Listening to Nineteenth-Century America / Edition 1

by Mark M. Smith

Overview

Arguing for the importance of the aural dimension of history, Mark M. Smith contends that to understand what it meant to be northern or southern, slave or free—to understand sectionalism and the attitudes toward modernity that led to the Civil War—we must consider how antebellum Americans comprehended the sounds and silences they heard.

Smith explores how northerners and southerners perceived the sounds associated with antebellum developments including the market revolution, industrialization, westward expansion, and abolitionism. In northern modernization, southern slaveholders heard the noise of the mob, the din of industrialism, and threats to what they considered their quiet, orderly way of life; in southern slavery, northern abolitionists and capitalists heard the screams of enslaved labor, the silence of oppression, and signals of premodernity that threatened their vision of the American future. Sectional consciousness was profoundly influenced by the sounds people attributed to their regions. And as sectionalism hardened into fierce antagonism, it propelled the nation toward its most earsplitting conflict, the Civil War.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807849828
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	12/09/2001
Edition description:	1
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.86(d)

About the Author

Mark M. Smith, author of Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South, is Carolina Distinguished Professor of History at the University of South Carolina in Columbia.

Read an Excerpt

Listening to Nineteenth-Century America

---

By Mark M. Smith

The University of North Carolina Press

Copyright © 2001 University of North Carolina Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8078-2657-7

---

Introduction

Sounding Pasts

Now I will do nothing but listen, To accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute toward it. -Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself," 1855

In simple Quaker dress, determined face framed by dark curls, the thirty-three-year-old South Carolinian stood before a packed Massachusetts state legislature in Boston on February 21, 1838. Nervous and apprehensive, she prepared to persuade her audience why southern slavery should be abolished and explain women's role in the process. Her jitters were understandable. While sympathetic ears filled the hall, scoffers doubting whether a woman should speak so publicly and politically abounded. Angelina Grimké was not the first American woman to denounce slavery, but until that day none had spoken to a U.S. legislative body.

Hush fell. "Mr. Chairman," she began. Her sounds punched the stillness with the force of novelty. She hit stride, regaling listeners with thoughts on the religious and political enormities of bondage. Her voice rang with the authenticity of someone who had witnessed slavery firsthand. In her choice of images Grimké conveyed the wretchedness of the peculiar institution in a way that touched hearts and hardened resolves: "I stand before you as a southerner, exiled from the land of my birth, by the sound of the lash, and the piteous cry of the slave."

What she said was heard in more than one sense. Enabling and urging her audience to hear not just her words but also the sounds of bondage was a way to tease at her listeners' guts and hearts. For many in the hall who had never actually heard slavery, they could now imagine how it sounded. Of course there were many northerners who could not or did not have the inclination to hear Angelina Grimké's aural representation of slavery on February 21. But actual hearing of what she had heard was not necessary because her speech was reprinted in the antislavery newspaper the Liberator a few days later on March 2. Her aural depiction and its authenticity were replayed via print, and readers could now hear, imagine, and reimagine what Grimké had heard and wanted them to hear. In this way her aural construction of slavery began to echo resoundingly in the ears and minds of increasingly powerful advocates of free labor and abolition. Sympathizers already disgusted with bondage found vivid confirmation in Grimké's representations; skeptics who had yet to be persuaded could find the aural projection persuasive, potent, and deeply emotive.

Angelina Grimké was neither the first nor the last to represent slavery aurally. Abolitionist travelers to the Old South and, especially, escaped slaves who recounted their experiences to northerners did the same. Travelers, Grimké, and fugitive slaves were authentic listeners because they had actually heard slavery. While there was doubtless some recognition that they exaggerated the frequency of screams, lashes, and clanking chains, their characterizations of southern sounds gained widespread acceptance among abolitionists of all stripes and, later, among supporters of free soil and free labor. For many northerners the South became a place alien and threatening because of how it sounded.

Grimké did not exhaust the lexicon of aurality used to represent the South. In following years other speakers added their voices and constructed the South as at once resounding with the noises of bondage and the silence of southern political tyranny and economic backwardness. Increasingly, abolitionists, free soilers, and Republicans constructed the South as aurally distinct and depraved. Aural descriptions offered a literal and metaphoric sense of the South as alien, which proved appealing to a wide variety of northern leaders in the years leading to civil war. Doubtless Angelina Grimké and others were unhappy with aspects of northern civilization and dimensions of its soundscape. After all, Grimké herself had been silenced by antislavery mobs. But she like many others preferred northern sounds to southern ones because the former resonated with freedom, progress, and humanity; the latter, with only misery, cruelty, and stagnation. Northern advocates of progress increasingly applauded the virtues of their own soundscape, in contrast to the noises of slavery, for in the hum of industry and the buzz of freedom they heard a society that not only was different from the South but reaffirmed their belief in the superiority of industrial, urban, free labor modernity.

William M. Bobo liked to travel. In the early 1850s the genteel South Carolinian jaunted north to New York City, and in 1852 he published his impressions of the place in a brief travelogue, Glimpses of New-York City, by a South Carolinian (Who Had Nothing Else to Do). Although he was not unmindful of the city's odors, sights and sounds guided Bobo in the great northern metropolis. "A stranger" to New York City, he began, "has many things to see and hear, most of which he does not really understand." Part of Bobo's job was to explain. In active, intimate prose he essayed to "give you an idea of the feeling which pervades the very soul of this community, in contradistinction to that which exists in the South," in part by urging his reading audience to hear northern society through his ears. Resounding with "rush and crowd," Gotham was a place where "emphatically large and fashionable hotels" suffered from "too much noise and confusion." The city echoed with the excesses of wage labor and northern capitalism, and its dissonance became more grating the farther in he ventured. Bobo prepared his readers' senses: "Any one who walks the streets of New-York with his eyes and ears open, sees and hears many strange and horrid things." "Poverty, sickness, filth, crime, and wretchedness" echoed in one ear while, in stark aural contrast, "silk rustles" of the sashaying skirts of bourgeois women sounded in the other. Islands of tranquility could be found, of course, but they only accentuated city noise. At Greenwood Cemetery he encountered deliciously "silent tombs[s]," an aural sanctuary "where the dead repose in blissful quietude, from the noisy and perplexing confusion which surround the living." "Is this not a sweet place?" he mused. "Here the world, with all its busy scenes, is shut out.... We make our beds in peace, and along these peaceful valleys the hum and din of earth's turmoil will never disturb our tranquil repose." Just outside the city, in Yonkers, he found "residences ... free from the musquitoes, dust and noise of the city." But time was not on the side of such quietude: "New-York will be out here one of these days." The expansive tendencies of northern capitalism would introduce "the noisy and vexatious walks of the living" to Yonkers and places even farther removed. The future sounded bleak to this man of the South.

Back in the city-this time at Five Points-Bobo ventured into one of several "drinking and dance-houses." "There lies a drunken female, screaming and yelling" while men were "cursing and swearing in the most blasphemous manner-a sort of medley which is indescribable." Overwhelmed, he abandoned his narrative: "Let us get out, my senses refuse to behold longer such scenes." Massive immigration, the exploitation of young factory women, and the general misery and wretchedness of wage labor society only "sickens the senses." Northern capitalism, urbanization, and industrialization had introduced more "poverty, prostitution, wretchedness, drunkenness, and all the attending vices, in this city, than [in] the whole South." "This," Bobo remarked, minimizing the extent to which similar sounds could be heard in the urban South, "is a comment upon Northern institutions." Yet northern critics of southern society seemed deaf to the sounds of their own failings. Instead of listening for the screams of southern slaves, abolitionists and free-soil sponsors would do well to turn an ear to their own wretchedness: "When the Abolitionists have cleared their own skirts, let them hold up their hands in holy horror at the slave-holder, and the enormity of his sins." A southerner had difficulty finding peace in such a city, thought Bobo, for southern folk coveted quietude and tranquility. Certainly stillness was found in Yankee taciturnity; though they lived together in close proximity, New Yorkers never talked to one another. A person could "be in the very midst of a half million people, and yet as quiet as if you were ten miles in rear of the Basin Spring, in North Carolina." The comparison seemed to jolt Bobo, perhaps making him hanker for the sounds of his home: "I suppose you are as tired listening to my illustration as I am telling it," and for the time being, he stopped listening and spared his own and readers' ears.

William Bobo's aural representations of New York City and northern modernity were hardly new, and similar examples can be found beginning principally in the 1830s when southern defenders of slavery began to hear the rise of what they perceived as an aggressive and threatening northern society. Often in response to abolitionists' critiques of slavery's evil strains, southern elites and politicians countered with the kind of aural critique of northern society offered by Bobo. Southern representations of the northern soundscape and all that it stood for were expressed in print and so communicated the failings of the North to many southerners who had never actually heard it in operation. Proslavery thinker George Fitzhugh, for example, did not visit, see, hear, or experience the North firsthand until 1855, but he, like Grimké's audiences, had read enough to learn how to listen and what to hear. In all likelihood Fitzhugh had at some point in his life heard sounds of slavery similar to those that assaulted Grimké's ears, but he, like Bobo and other elite white southerners, rarely commented on these aspects of the southern soundscape. Instead Fitzhugh listened for what he and others believed were the keynotes of southern society-tranquility and quietude punctuated with a healthy dose of humming industriousness and the melodies of singing slaves-and contrasted them with what they believed was the destructiveness of northern modernity. In his 1850 Slavery Justified, Fitzhugh argued that the social arrangement of slavery and its harmonizing of labor and capital meant that "We have no mobs, no trades unions, no strikes for higher wages" and "but few in our jails, and fewer in our poor houses." The consequence was heard as much as seen: "At the slaveholding South all is peace, quiet, plenty and contentment." Following his visit North, in 1857 Fitzhugh published Cannibals All!, a scathing critique of the dangerous tendencies of wage labor. What he had previously read about how northern society sounded was confirmed by the cultural bias of his hearing and selective listening. The competition between labor and capital, Fitzhugh maintained, led to revolution, and its beginnings could be heard in the noises of poverty, wretchedness, and strife that would reach a crescendo in a maddening and destructive cacophony of social dislocation. When capitalists' efforts to tame workers' demands had failed ("we must use violence to keep you quiet," Fitzhugh imagined them saying), "the maddening cry of hunger for employment and bread" would culminate in "the grumbling noise of the heaving volcano that threatens and precedes a social eruption greater than the world has yet witnessed." The rumblings of class conflict and social revolution could be heard in the noises of industrialism, capitalism, and unfettered exploitation.

While exceptional in several respects, Grimké, Bobo, and Fitzhugh were typical in how they understood, imagined, and projected their abstract and actual environments and sectional identities. Most nineteenth-century Americans experienced their worlds through their senses. At times they understood by using-deliberately and unwittingly-all five senses at once (if they had them); at other times one sense took primacy but rarely to the exclusion of the others. It seems almost audacious to point out that in the past, peoples sensed their worlds, their environments, and their places and mediated their experiences sensorially. Obvious though this fact is, however, it warrants stating not least because we are prone to examine the past through the eyes of those who experienced it. While people interpreted their worlds visually, it is also worth iterating that seeing was but one way in which they experienced. Yet for reasons that have to do with the nineteenth-century preoccupation with visuality, the rise of print culture, and the long shadows cast by these developments, it seems fair to say that a good deal of historical work interprets the past principally, if unwittingly and implicitly, through historical actors' eyes. Historians rarely consider in any explicit or systematic way the other four senses, and so a good deal of what we know about most historical experience is really a history of what people saw. In this sense (literally) we understand the past in one-fifth of its texture and scope, and historical analyses of how people sensed-heard, tasted, smelled, and touched-are staggeringly few and far between. Certainly the importance of the eye to nineteenth-century Americans should not be doubted; print, perspective, new technologies of vision, and faith in seeing were important to the construction of ocular modernity. But there is no legitimate reason to read the past solely through contemporaries' vision. This study recovers another way people sensed their worlds-through a faculty emphasized by contemporaries and that they took as seriously as their seeing and other sensory understandings.

This is a study of how people heard the principal economic, cultural, and political-hence social-developments of the United States in the nineteenth century and how their hearing at the everyday level affected their selective hearing and listening to, among other developments, the coming of the Civil War, antebellum class formation, slavery, freedom, modernization, the war itself, and Reconstruction. In this book I do not posit the senses as oppositional; rather, I attempt to recover another, additional, often complementary way people experienced and made sense of their lives, environments, relationships, and identities. Other forms of sensory experience-touching, tasting, and smelling-are important and deserve sustained investigation. But I profile how people heard not least because aurality was important enough to contribute meaningfully and significantly to the construction of what it meant to be northern, southern, slave, or free in nineteenth-century America. When we add sound to sight in our understanding of how historical actors conceptualized and mediated their identities, we begin to understand more fully how important aurality, listening, and hearing were to the process of creating real and abiding notions of slavery and freedom, North and South, especially during the last three decades prior to the Civil War. Without listening to what and how nineteenth-century Americans heard, we will remain only partially aware of the depth, texture, and nature of sectional identity and deny ourselves access to a fuller explanation of how that identity came into being with such terrible resolve. Sectional consciousness was sensed, and hearing and listening as much as looking and seeing were important to its creation.

Sounds and their meanings are shaped by the cultural, economic, and political contexts in which they are produced and heard. Because sound was so embedded in the various fabrics of antebellum U.S. life and consciousness, we must listen as much to the economic and the political as to the cultural if we are to begin to recover the principal meanings that lay in their articulation. Treating aural history simply as a cultural, political, or economic project decontextualizes what must be contextualized, denudes the past of its interrelated texture, and contributes to our deafness by denying us an understanding of how political sounds were shaped by, and in turn influenced, cultural whispers, economic booms, and social screams. Heard worlds, like the seen, were so intimately connected that to reveal their full complexity we should listen to them in their entirety as best we can. Thus while some readers may balk at the binary "North and South" depicted in this study (and the master narrative used to tease out the creation and working of the dialectic), they wince at what and how people heard and the terrible reality of two sections that did in fact go to bloody war.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from Listening to Nineteenth-Century America by Mark M. Smith Copyright © 2001 by University of North Carolina Press. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	ix
	Introduction: Sounding Pasts	1
Part I.	Imagining Maestros: Constructing and Defending the Southern Soundscape	19
Chapter 1.	Soniferous Gardens	23
Chapter 2.	Creeping Discord	47
Chapter 3.	Dreadful, Silent Moments	67
Part II.	Keynotes Old and New: Listening to Northern Soundscapes	93
Chapter 4.	Northern Echoes	95
Chapter 5.	Sounds Modern	119
Part III.	Aural Sectionalism: The Politics of Hearing and the Hearing of Politics	147
Chapter 6.	Listening to Bondage	150
Chapter 7.	Northern Shouts and Southern Ears	172
Part IV.	Noises Hideous, Silences Profound, Sounds Ironic: Listening to the Civil War and Reconstruction	195
Chapter 8.	Noises of War	198
Chapter 9.	Confederate Soundscapes	219
Chapter 10.	Sounds of Emancipation, Reconstruction, and Reunion	238
	Sound Matters: An Essay on Method	261
	Notes	271
	Bibliography	323
	Index	357

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Well written and innovative in its approach, this book complicates and enriches the discussion of why sectionalism developed in the 1830s through the 1850s and how it contributed to the Civil War.—North Carolina Historical Review



[Listening to Nineteenth-Century America] is an eye-opening—or more to the point, ear-opening—exercise in the retrieval of potentially lost knowledge. Mark Smith's wonderful study of the 'aural landscape' of nineteenth-century America deplores the historiographical privileging of the visual sense.—Journal of American Studies



The story of how the study of the sounds of everyday life help us to understand the coming of the Civil War, the war itself, and some of the politics of Reconstruction by giving a new dimension to a traditional historiography. . . . An exciting study that illuminates new areas of historical investigation.—Civil War Book Review



Mark M. Smith ranks among the most original and innovative contemporary southern historians. He focuses analytically and creatively on questions virtually ignored by previous scholars, rereading long-familiar sources and forcing us to rethink basic components of the southern past. Smith consistently raises our consciousness to subtle and not-so-subtle forces that figured into the North-South dialogue.—Georgia Historical Quarterly



What were the sounds of slavery, riots, steam-driven factories, and commerce before the Civil War? By asking such questions, Smith makes antebellum America more palpable to present-day readers.—Doubletake



In this fascinating study Mark M. Smith analyzes how sound and the heard world contributed to the formation of sectional identities during the antebellum period; how the Civil War and Reconstruction changed the nation's listening habits; and how postbellum Americans reinterpreted the country's soundscapes. . . . Most historians of the nineteenth century privilege the world of sight and vision both in their choice of source material and in their analysis of those sources. Smith shows the limits of such an approach. He teaches us how meaningful sound was to the people of the nineteenth century and how useful an awareness of the heard world can be for historians seeking to understand the past in a more fully textured way.—Journal of Southern History



Listening to Nineteenth Century America is artfully written, and painstakingly researched. . . . [It] contributes to the emerging field of sound studies by pointing out that sound is a fruitful way to think about production; the study of sound can connect us as surely to the material world as the printed word or image.—Journal of Social History



Smith does a marvelous job describing the soundscapes of antebellum America, making skilled use of diaries, personal narratives and letters, as well as novels and political tracts. . . . His evocative descriptions of the sounds of different seasons, events, and activities turn up the volume on the entire fabric of nineteenth-century life.—Common-place



Is it possible to hear the sounds and silences of history? These are the questions at the heart of Mark M. Smith's innovative new work, Listening to Nineteenth-Century America, one of the first historical studies to make aural experience its analytical centerpiece. . . . [Smith] offers rich sources and insights for scholars of literature, philosophy, and cultural studies. . . . A richly suggestive book that. . . . initiates important conversations about the larger relationship between sound and ideology, offers fresh insights about bells and other particular soundmarks, and pushes forward long-running scholarly debates about the roots of sectionalism. . . . There is no question that Smith's efforts will have a positive impact on a wide range of scholarship. After reading Listening to Nineteenth-Century America, one is forced to pay attention to questions of volume, sound, and aural control in productive new ways.—Reviews in American History



A fascinating attempt to explore the ways in which 'hearing' how the past sounded enriches our understanding. . . . A fine book that combines a polished account of rhetoric in the sectional crisis with a new perspective on the words that brought the United States to civil war.—Journal of American History

Editorial Reviews

Mark Smith has turned up the volume on the political rhetoric, resistance tactics and soundscapes of sectional disputes, slavery, the Civil War and much more. Students of history, filmmakers and anyone interested in the sound of America will find this book indispensable. (Douglas Kahn, University of Technology, Sydney)

This groundbreaking book adds a new dimension to our understanding of the roots of secession. (Eugene D. Genovese, author of "A Consuming Fire: The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind of the White Christian South")

From the Publisher

Mark Smith has turned up the volume on the political rhetoric, resistance tactics and soundscapes of sectional disputes, slavery, the Civil War and much more. Students of history, filmmakers and anyone interested in the sound of America will find this book indispensable.

Douglas Kahn

This groundbreaking book adds a new dimension to our understanding of the roots of secession.

Eugene D. Genovese