De Lan’ of Sweet Dreams

Abstract

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.