Two points in this discussion I want to underscore.  The first about comparing Japan to the South.  Absolutely yes, manners and shame tamp down violence.  But it is important to remember that Japan is and for a long time has been densely populated.  Much more densely populated than the American South.  In addition to 'honor culture,' the South and all former slaveholding societies, are burdened with the tradition of use of violence or the threat of violence to control labor.  This tradition dies hard.  Most of the former slaveholding societies are majority black and whites long ago were put in fear of former slaves.  Even the Cuban Revolution of the 1950s, Marxist inspired as it was, played out some of those dynamics in what was an island nation which still imagined that its leadership descended from the masters while its peasantry descended from the slaves.  (Cuba has long since developed an overwhelming black majority.)
    Second, the point about forgiveness among African-Americans should be seen for what it is:  the direct expression of Christian piety.  The erection of myriad black-run churches in the aftermath of Emancipation helps demonstrate the point.  African-Americans had become thoroughly Christian by the mid-19th century.  Blacks were of course aware of the bitter fruits of bondage for themselves but they, especially in Virginia where half the Civil War battles were fought, saw the bitter fruit harvested by white Virginians, too.  Moses and the Children of Israel did not revel in the death of all the firstborn of Egypt nor did they pray for the death of the second-born.  (Another way to see this is that black people do not don blue uniforms and march through say Atlanta or Richmond every year, saying we kicked your butts in the 1860s and you should never forget it.  Think Orangemen marched through the north of Ireland!!  Instead, there were and still are many Emancipation Day celebrations.)
    Finally, the WPA narratives are the endpoint of slave autobiography collection.  John Blassingame did an excellent job of tracking down most other sources but there still may be some out there.  It was recently reported that a slave narrative published in lower Canada in 1869 had just been acquired by the UVA library.  I am particularly impressed with the work in the 1920s done at Fisk University:  an example is God Struck Me Dead.  Here you had an African-American sociologist, who moreover was kin to these families that had migrated from Mississippi to Tennessee after Emancipation.  It has always been my hope that somewhere in the archives at Fisk there is more folklore of this kind.  I also remember that Hampton Institute began collecting slave autobiographies in the 1890s.  Some must have been published in the Southern Workman but there has been to my knowledge no edited volume with these voices in them.  Such a source, should it survive, was capture the voices of slaves who were under the lash at mid-life;  many of whom might also have been Union veterans.

Harold S. Forsythe

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