“An Itchin ’Roun the Heart You Can't Get at to Scratch”: Exploring the Emotion of Love in Black Enslaved Communities of the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Through adopting a history-of-emotions framework, this article explores romantic love within Black enslaved communities of the antebellum and early postbellum South. Whilst several historians have already explored the emotion of love in enslaved emotional communities, there is a growing understanding by scholars of the history of emotions that emotions, including love, are not always adequately historicized, and have perhaps been taken at face or written value. In some contrast to previous historical scholarship, this article argues that the love, as expressed and experienced within Black enslaved communities, was complex, contentious, and far from monolithic.