Psychohistory and Family Among Antebellum Slaveholders

This article examines the macroscopic reasons for maternal rage and its injection into slaveholder children in the antebellum South. It is argued that the misogyny that infected antebellum life metastasized in southern mistresses and affected the way they felt about themselves and their children. As mothers, they were casual parents, concerned with molding the character of their charges, rearing warriors and proper ladies, but uninterested in caring for them and helping them realize their own aspirations. It is argued that the misanthropic rage that they injected into their children constituted the poison that each generation of slaveholders had to ventilate into poison containers, slaves, as a homeostatic means of psycho-emotional survival. This intergenerational process of poison injection--from father to mother, from mother to child, from child to slave, constituted the process that insured the perpetuation of the psychic structure necessary for the continuation of slavery from generation to generation.