The Pursuit of Happiness: The Emotional Politics of Freedom and Race in the Reconstruction South

In the Antebellum South the institution of slavery fundamentally shaped the emotions and affective practices of enslaved people and slaveholders alike. In a social world in which fear, love, jealousy, happiness, mourning and marriage were inextricably linked to slavery, Emancipation and the end of the Civil War raised myriad questions: What would collective and individual emotions look like in the post-war south? Would affective norms be structured primarily by race or free status?  Former slaves quickly embraced the pursuit of happiness as a newfound inalienable right, and many sought to cast off the emotional strictures, affective censorship and coerced feelings that bound them during slavery. However southern whites did not respond well to this seismic shift in their affective landscape. Threatened by manifestations of joy and emotional license amongst free blacks, southern whites would work to preserve as many of the affective norms and rules of slavery as possible in the decades following the war.

 My talk will focus on the variety of ways that free blacks openly challenged the emotional norms of slavery, including negotiating new terms of labor, seeking out loved ones, and actively engaging in spaces, activities, holidays and emotional expressions that had been denied to them while enslaved. I will also examine how white southerners responded to these perceived threats to post-war affective norms with legal and extralegal means. Studying emotions and race in the post-war south provides fresh insight into the process of Emancipation and Reconstruction, revealing how free people embraced freedom as political and emotional, and how former slaveholders sought to affectively restrict those they could no longer legally master. This project also contributes to the burgeoning field of emotional history by complicating understandings of how feelings are constructed in relation to power, and how power operates in affective relations.