Helena Guenther

Bio

Helena Guenther is a summa cum laude graduate of Duke University in History with a concentration in Race and Ethnicity and a minor in Political Science. Her academic interests focus on American slavery and contemporary race politics. At Duke, she served as co-Editor-in-Chief of Duke’s undergraduate historical review. Previously, she interned at the U.S. Senate and studied abroad in Venice, Italy. She is a passionate advocate for women’s rights and for survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence.

Thesis

Helena Guenther was awarded the William T. LaPrade Prize, presented annually to the student recognized with the most outstanding senior thesis.

See full thesis: As White As Their Masters: The White Slave in Antebellum Abolitionist Propaganda

Faculty Advisor: Thavolia Glymph

Thesis Abstract

In the decades leading up to the Civil War, references to the white slave proliferated in abolitionist newspapers and literary texts. These works constituted a distinct brand of abolitionist propaganda intended to inform and craft Northerners’ understandings of race and racial difference with the aim of arousing their abolitionist sentiments. This thesis constructs an alternative archive of white slave propaganda that includes trial transcripts, literatures, newspaper articles and photographs in order to explore the ways in which the white slave unearthed deep-seated insecurities within the ideology of race designed to maintain and perpetuate slavery and white hegemony. Using the white slave as a protean subject who could be recast to resonate with different audiences, black and white abolitionist authors simultaneously subverted and accommodated racialist discourse espoused by proslavery ideologues. Freedom suits and racial identity trials of the early to mid-19th century in Southern courtrooms involving white slaves became spaces for contesting and reimagining white constructions of race and gender. The practice of photographing white slaves and displaying them before audiences, which gained prominence in the 1850s and continued through the Civil War, exemplified adaptive abolitionist tactics that culminated in the white slave campaign of 1864. An evolving abolitionist project, white slave propaganda exposed the fragility of white identity and rendered the white slave as a fixture of radical antislavery agitation. 

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