Laughter, Civility, and Shifting Social Climates in Advice to Freedmen Books

This paper begins with Isaac Brinckerhoff’s Advice to Freedman (1865) and his curious expression “to make you happy,” which he offers his audience as a combination promise/justification for his text. What does making his... [ view full abstract ]

This paper begins with Isaac Brinckerhoff’s Advice to Freedman (1865) and his curious expression “to make you happy,” which he offers his audience as a combination promise/justification for his text. What does making his freedmen addressee happy have to do with producing civil subjects? What expectations of proper behavior are implied, and what types of violence does such a seemingly banal declaration inhere? To answer these questions, I consider the recurrence of happiness as a theme across this particular advice genre in relation to descriptions of laughter and the performance of proper bourgeois etiquette. Texts such as Advice to Freedmen and Jared Waterbury’s Friendly Counsels for Freedmen, in a manner akin to the performative expectations of late nineteenth-century blackface minstrelsy, register a barely unconscious preoccupation with reorienting social expectations in relation to Black freedom. As Saidiya Harman’s work on the genre indicates, the ideal of freedom as something sustained by a sovereign individual encouraged resentment toward those who failed to adequately self-govern. Self-control remained necessary antecedent for cultivating a reliable work ethic, as advice books commended productive conduct tied to measured bodily desires and temperate consumption within their vision of civility. I situate my interest in laughter here, as we tend to think of laughter as a visceral disruption to bodily composure that appears at odds with the expressed aims of the genre. I find these texts not only recalibrate the laughter and happiness of freedmen as part of their overall objective of fashioning a productive labor force but also, in doing so, renegotiate the conditions of possibility for expressions of joy. I conclude by situating this renegotiation in the context of both Sara Ahmed’s work on the politics of good feeling and Reconstruction. Keeping the conference’s theme on Climate and the seminar’s focus on In/Civility in mind, my aim is to collectively contemplate the atmospheric shifts such renegotiations engender.