Slave Suicide, Abolition and the Problem of Resistance

Abstract

Shifting calculations about the political palatability of representing slave suicide in American abolitionist print culture reveal the extent to which debates about agency, power and consent – and thus about self-destruction – lay at the heart of that new nation's struggle over the future of slavery. Was a slave's suicide an act of principled resistance to tyranny that challenged the hypocrisy of the revolutionary settlement? Or was it a measure of abject victimhood that begged for humanitarian intervention? That representations of black suicide oscillated so dramatically between these opposing interpretive frameworks testifies to deep divides between moderates and militants, and between whites and blacks, as to who had the power to bring slavery to its knees.