To Come and Go by De Bells and Horns: Sonic Signals and Antebellum Slave-Labor Management

The control of aural space is the prerogative of the powerful, and the antebellum slave-holding classes took care to affirm their dominant status aurally as well as physically. Slaves were trained to respond immediately to the encoded sonic directives that slave managers sent forth via bells, horns and sundry other instruments. In some circumstances, the crack of a whip served as the signal that woke slaves from their rest.  As drivers, slaves were co-opted into sending forth their masters’ commanding calls. However, knowledge of their master’s sonic systems allowed slaves to resist by turning the interstices between predictable signals into temporal spaces for the exercise of their own designs.   Slave holders and overseers across America’s antebellum South used sonic signals to regulate the working hours of their field hands; as with other kinds of periodically regimented labor, their intent was to maximize efficiency and instill discipline. Beyond this, the Southern master classes relied upon signaling instruments to aid them in their perpetual, if futile, paranoiac struggles for uncontested sovereignty over their human chattel. In the slave-holders’ self-created world of psychotic violence and coercion – a world publicly denied, but phenomenologically omnipresent – sonic signals permitted insecure masters to episodically or randomly summon slaves in order to observe and govern their activities at any time.   

Nonetheless, since sonic signaling instruments enabled slave managers to command underlings from a distance, functioning as delineators and intermediaries between their shared but divided worlds, the slaves used the spatial and aural distance imposed upon them to pursue their own, self-willed, private acts. My paper examines the complex interplay of slave managers’ use of sonic signals to protect and entrench their dominance, and slaves’ subversions of their masters’ signaling systems to their own ends.