SCHMOLL/HISTORY231/DOCUMENT BASED WORK ON SLAVERY
1.
Sarah Frances Shaw Graves, Age 87 "I was born March
23, 1850 in Kentucky, somewhere near Louisville. I am goin' on 88 years right
now. (1937). I was brought to Missouri when I was six months old, along with my
mama, who was a slave owned by a man named Shaw, who had allotted her to a man
named Jimmie Graves, who came to Missouri to live with his daughter Emily
Graves Crowdes. I always lived with Emily Crowdes."
The matter of
allotment was confusing to the interviewer and Aunt Sally endeavored to
explain.
"Yes'm.
Allotted? Yes'm. I'm goin' to explain that, " she replied. "You see
there was slave traders in those days, jes' like you got horse and mule an'
auto traders now. They bought and sold slaves and hired 'em out. Yes'm, rented
'em out. Allotted means somethin' like hired out. But the slave never got no
wages. That all went to the master. The man they was allotted to paid the
master."
"I was never
sold. My mama was sold only once, but she was hired out many times. Yes'm when
a slave was allotted, somebody made a down payment and gave a mortgage for the
rest. A chattel mortgage. . . ."
"Allotments made
a lot of grief for the slaves," Aunt Sally asserted. "We left my papa
in Kentucky, 'cause he was allotted to another man. My papa never knew where my
mama went, an' my mama never knew where papa went." Aunt Sally paused a
moment, then went on bitterly. "They never wanted mama to know, 'cause
they knowed she would never marry so long she knew where he was. Our master
wanted her to marry again and raise more children to be slaves. They never
wanted mama to know where papa was, an' she never did," sighed Aunt Sally.
2.
Sarah Gudger, Age 121 
I 'membahs de
time when mah mammy wah alive, I wah a small chile, afoah dey tuck huh t' Rims
Crick. All us chillens wah playin' in de ya'd one night. Jes' arunnin' an'
aplayin' lak chillun will. All a sudden mammy cum to de do' all a'sited.
"Cum in heah dis minnit," she say. "Jes look up at what is
ahappenin'," and bless yo' life, honey, da sta's wah fallin' jes' lak
rain.* Mammy wah tebble skeered, but we chillen wa'nt afeard, no, we wa'nt
afeard. But mammy she say evah time a sta' fall, somebuddy gonna die. Look lak
lotta folks gonna die f'om de looks ob dem sta's. Ebbathin' wah jes' as bright
as day. Yo' cudda pick a pin up. Yo' know de sta's don' shine as bright as dey
did back den. I wondah wy dey don'. Dey jes' don' shine as bright. Wa'nt long
afoah dey took mah mammy away, and I wah lef' alone.
3.
Charley Williams, Age 94
When de day
begin to crack de whole plantation break out wid all kinds of noises, and you
could tell what going on by de kind of noise you hear.
Come de daybreak
you hear de guinea fowls start potracking down at the edge of de woods lot, and
den de roosters all start up 'round de barn and de ducks finally wake up and
jine in. You can smell de sow belly frying down at the cabins in de
"row," to go wid de hoecake and de buttermilk.
Den purty soon
de wind rise a little, and you can hear a old bell donging way on some
plantation a mile or two off, and den more bells at other places and maybe a
horn, and purty soon younder go old Master's old ram horn wid a long toot and
den some short toots, and here come de overseer down de row of cabins,
hollering right and left, and picking de ham out'n his teeth wid a long shiny
goose quill pick.
Bells and horns!
Bells for dis and horns for dat! All we knowed was go and come by de bells and
horns!
4.
. “The Universal Law of
Slavery," by George Fitzhugh (most important advocate of slavery) 1857
He the Negro is but a grown up child, and must be governed as a child, not as a lunatic or criminal. The master occupies toward him the place of parent or guardian. We shall not dwell on this view, for no one will differ with us who thinks as we do of the negro's capacity, and we might argue till dooms-day in vain, with those who have a high opinion of the negro's moral and intellectual capacity.
Secondly. The negro is improvident; will not lay up in summer for the wants of winter; will not accumulate in youth for the exigencies of age. He would become an insufferable burden to society. Society has the right to prevent this, and can only do so by subjecting him to domestic slavery. In the last place, the negro race is inferior to the white race, and living in their midst, they would be far outstripped or outwitted in the chaos of free competition. Gradual but certain extermination would be their fate. We presume the maddest abolitionist does not think the negro's providence of habits and money-making capacity at all to compare to those of the whites. This defect of character would alone justify enslaving him, if he is to remain here. In Africa or the West Indies, he would become idolatrous, savage and cannibal, or be devoured by savages and cannibals. At the North he would freeze or starve.
We would remind those who deprecate and sympathize with negro slavery, that his slavery here relieves him from a far more cruel slavery in Africa, or from idolatry and cannibalism, and every brutal vice and crime that can disgrace humanity; and that it christianizes, protects, supports and civilizes him; that it governs him far better than free laborers at the North are governed. There, wife-murder has become a mere holiday pastime; and where so many wives are murdered, almost all must be brutally treated. Nay, more; men who kill their wives or treat them brutally, must be ready for all kinds of crime, and the calendar of crime at the North proves the inference to be correct. Negroes never kill their wives. If it be objected that legally they have no wives, then we reply, that in an experience of more than forty years, we never yet heard of a negro man killing a negro woman. Our negroes are not only better off as to physical comfort than free laborers, but their moral condition is better.
The negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and, in some sense, the freest people in the world. The children and the aged and infirm work not at all, and yet have all the comforts and necessaries of life provided for them. They enjoy liberty, because they are oppressed neither by care nor labor. The women do little hard work, and are protected from the despotism of their husbands by their masters. The negro men and stout boys work, on the average, in good weather, not more than nine hours a day. The balance of their time is spent in perfect abandon. Besides' they have their Sabbaths and holidays. White men, with so much of license and liberty, would die of ennui; but negroes luxuriate in corporeal and mental repose. With their faces upturned to the sun, they can sleep at any hour; and quiet sleep is the greatest of human enjoyments. "Blessed be the man who invented sleep." 'Tis happiness in itself--and results from contentment with the present, and confident assurance of the future.
A common charge preferred against slavery is, that it induces idleness with the masters. The trouble, care and labor, of providing for wife, children and slaves, and of properly governing and administering the whole affairs of the farm, is usually borne on small estates by the master. On larger ones, he is aided by an overseer or manager. If they do their duty, their time is fully occupied. If they do not, the estate goes to ruin. The mistress, on Southern farms, is usually more busily, usefully and benevolently occupied than any one on the farm. She unites in her person, the offices of wife, mother, mistress, housekeeper, and sister of charity. And she fulfills all these offices admirably well. The rich men, in free society, may, if they please, lounge about town, visit clubs, attend the theatre, and have no other trouble than that of collecting rents, interest and dividends of stock. In a well constituted slave society, there should be no idlers. But we cannot divine how the capitalists in free society are to put to work. The master labors for the slave, they exchange industrial value. But the capitalist, living on his income, gives nothing to his subjects. He lives by mere exploitations.
He the Negro is but a grown up child, and must be governed as a child, not as a lunatic or criminal. The master occupies toward him the place of parent or guardian. We shall not dwell on this view, for no one will differ with us who thinks as we do of the negro's capacity, and we might argue till dooms-day in vain, with those who have a high opinion of the negro's moral and intellectual capacity.
Secondly. The negro is improvident; will not lay up in summer for the wants of winter; will not accumulate in youth for the exigencies of age. He would become an insufferable burden to society. Society has the right to prevent this, and can only do so by subjecting him to domestic slavery. In the last place, the negro race is inferior to the white race, and living in their midst, they would be far outstripped or outwitted in the chaos of free competition. Gradual but certain extermination would be their fate. We presume the maddest abolitionist does not think the negro's providence of habits and money-making capacity at all to compare to those of the whites. This defect of character would alone justify enslaving him, if he is to remain here. In Africa or the West Indies, he would become idolatrous, savage and cannibal, or be devoured by savages and cannibals. At the North he would freeze or starve.
We would remind those who deprecate and sympathize with negro slavery, that his slavery here relieves him from a far more cruel slavery in Africa, or from idolatry and cannibalism, and every brutal vice and crime that can disgrace humanity; and that it christianizes, protects, supports and civilizes him; that it governs him far better than free laborers at the North are governed. There, wife-murder has become a mere holiday pastime; and where so many wives are murdered, almost all must be brutally treated. Nay, more; men who kill their wives or treat them brutally, must be ready for all kinds of crime, and the calendar of crime at the North proves the inference to be correct. Negroes never kill their wives. If it be objected that legally they have no wives, then we reply, that in an experience of more than forty years, we never yet heard of a negro man killing a negro woman. Our negroes are not only better off as to physical comfort than free laborers, but their moral condition is better.
The negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and, in some sense, the freest people in the world. The children and the aged and infirm work not at all, and yet have all the comforts and necessaries of life provided for them. They enjoy liberty, because they are oppressed neither by care nor labor. The women do little hard work, and are protected from the despotism of their husbands by their masters. The negro men and stout boys work, on the average, in good weather, not more than nine hours a day. The balance of their time is spent in perfect abandon. Besides' they have their Sabbaths and holidays. White men, with so much of license and liberty, would die of ennui; but negroes luxuriate in corporeal and mental repose. With their faces upturned to the sun, they can sleep at any hour; and quiet sleep is the greatest of human enjoyments. "Blessed be the man who invented sleep." 'Tis happiness in itself--and results from contentment with the present, and confident assurance of the future.
A common charge preferred against slavery is, that it induces idleness with the masters. The trouble, care and labor, of providing for wife, children and slaves, and of properly governing and administering the whole affairs of the farm, is usually borne on small estates by the master. On larger ones, he is aided by an overseer or manager. If they do their duty, their time is fully occupied. If they do not, the estate goes to ruin. The mistress, on Southern farms, is usually more busily, usefully and benevolently occupied than any one on the farm. She unites in her person, the offices of wife, mother, mistress, housekeeper, and sister of charity. And she fulfills all these offices admirably well. The rich men, in free society, may, if they please, lounge about town, visit clubs, attend the theatre, and have no other trouble than that of collecting rents, interest and dividends of stock. In a well constituted slave society, there should be no idlers. But we cannot divine how the capitalists in free society are to put to work. The master labors for the slave, they exchange industrial value. But the capitalist, living on his income, gives nothing to his subjects. He lives by mere exploitations.
The Black American A Documentary History, Third Edition, by Leslie H. Fishel, Jr. and Benjamin Quarles, Scott, Foresman and Company, Illinois, 1976,1970
5. Theodore Dwight Weld, 1839, Slavery as it Really Is
Reader, you are empaneled as a juror to try a plain case and
bring in an honest verdict. The question at issue is not one of law, but of
fact--"What is the actual condition of the slaves in the United
States?" A plainer case never went to a jury. Look at it. Twenty seven
hundred thousand persons in this country, men, women, and children, are in
slavery. Is slavery, as a condition for human beings, good, bad, or
indifferent?...
Two millions seven hundred thousand persons in these States
are in this condition. They are made slaves and are held such by force, and by
being put in fear, and this for no crime!...
As slaveholders and their apologists are...flooding the world
with testimony that their slaves are kindly treated; that they are well fed,
well clothed, well housed, well lodged, moderately worked, and bountifully
provided with all things needful for their comfort, we propose--first, to
disprove their assertions by the testimony of a multitude of impartial
witnesses, and then to put slaveholders themselves through a course of
cross-questioning which shall draw their condemnation out of their own mouths.
We will prove that the slaves in the United States are treated with barbarous
inhumanity; that they are overworked, underfed, wretchedly clad and lodged, and
have insufficient sleep; that they are often made to wear round their necks
iron collars armed with prongs, to drag heavy chains and weights at their feet
while working in the field, and to wear yokes, and bells, and iron horns; that
they are often kept confined in the stocks day and night for weeks together,
made to wear gags in their mouths for hours or days, have some of their front
teeth torn out or broken off, that they may be easily detected when they run
away; that they are frequently flogged with terrible severity, have red pepper
rubbed into their lacerated flesh, and hot brine, spirits of turpentine,
&c., poured over the gashes to increase the torture; that they are often
stripped naked, their backs and limbs cut with knives, bruised and mangled by
scores and hundreds of blows with the paddle, and terribly torn by the claws of
cats, drawn over them by their tormenters; that they are often hunted with
blood hounds and shot down like beasts, or torn in pieces by dogs; that they
are often suspended by the arms and whipped and beaten till they faint, and
when revived by restoratives, beaten again till they faint, and sometimes till
they die; that their ears are often cut off, their eyes knocked out, their
bones broken, their flesh branded with red hot irons; that they are maimed,
mutilated, and burned to death over slow fires.... We will establish all these
facts by the testimony of scores and hundreds of eye witnesses, by the
testimony of slaveholders in all parts of the slave states, by slaveholding
members of Congress and of state legislatures, by ambassadors to foreign
courts, by judges, by doctors of divinity, and clergy men of all denominations,
by merchants, mechanics, lawyers and physicians, by presidents and professors
in colleges and professional seminaries, by planters, overseers and drivers.
6. David Walker's Appeal
My dearly beloved Brethren and Fellow Citizens.
Having
travelled over a considerable portion of these United States, and having, in
the course of my travels, taken the most accurate observations of things as
they exist -- the result of my observations has warranted the full and unshaken
conviction, that we, (coloured people of these United States,) are the most
degraded, wretched, and abject set of beings that ever lived since the world
began; and I pray God that none like us ever may live again until time shall be
no more. They tell us of the Israelites in Egypt, the Helots in Sparta, and of
the Roman Slaves, which last were made up from almost every nation under
heaven, whose sufferings under those ancient and heathen nations, were, in
comparison with ours, under this enlightened and Christian nation, no more than
a cypher -- or, in other words, those heathen nations of antiquity, had but
little more among them than the name and form of slavery; while wretchedness
and endless miseries were reserved, apparently in a phial, to be poured out
upon, our fathers ourselves and our children, by Christian Americans!
... I call upon the professing Christians, I call upon the philanthropist, I
call upon the very tyrant himself, to show me a page of history, either sacred
or profane, on which a verse can be found, which maintains, that the Egyptians
heaped the insupportable insult upon the children of Israel, by telling
them that they were not of the human family. Can the whites deny this
charge? Have they not, after having reduced us to the deplorable condition of
slaves under their feet, held us up as descending originally from the tribes of
Monkeys or Orang-Outangs? O! my God! I appeal to every man of
feeling-is not this insupportable? Is it not heaping the most gross insult upon
our miseries, because they have got us under their feet and we cannot help ourselves?
Oh! pity us we pray thee, Lord Jesus, Master. -- Has Mr. Jefferson declared to
the world, that we are inferior to the whites, both in the endowments of our
bodies and our minds? It is indeed surprising, that a man of such great
learning, combined with such excellent natural parts, should speak so of a set
of men in chains. I do not know what to compare it to, unless, like putting one
wild deer in an iron cage, where it will be secured, and hold another by the
side of the same, then let it go, and expect the one in the cage to run as fast
as the one at liberty. So far, my brethren, were the Egyptians from heaping
these insults upon their slaves, that Pharaoh's daughter took Moses, a son of
Israel for her own, as will appear by the following.
The world knows, that
slavery as it existed was, mans, (which was the primary cause of their
destruction) was, comparatively speaking, no more than a cypher, when
compared with ours under the Americans. Indeed I should not have noticed the
Roman slaves, had not the very learned and penetrating Mr. Jefferson said,
"when a master was murdered, all his slaves in the same house, or within
hearing, were condemned to death." -- Here let me ask Mr. Jefferson, (but
he is gone to answer at the bar of God, for the deeds done in his body while
living,) I therefore ask the whole American people, had I not rather die, or be
put to death, than to be a slave to any tyrant, who takes not only my own, but
my wife and children's lives by the inches? Yea, would I meet death with avidity
far! far!! in preference to such servile submission to the murderous
hands of tyrants. Mr. Jefferson's very severe remarks on us have been so
extensively argued upon by men whose attainments in literature, I shall never
be able to reach, that I would not have meddled with it, were it not to solicit
each of my brethren, who has the spirit of a man, to buy a copy of Mr.
Jefferson's "Notes on Virginia," and put it in the hand of his son.
But
let us review Mr. Jefferson's remarks respecting us some further. Comparing our
miserable fathers, with the learned philosophers of Greece, he says: "Yet
notwithstanding these and other discouraging circumstances among the Romans,
their slaves were often their rarest artists. They excelled too, in science,
insomuch as to be usually employed as tutors to their master's children;
Epictetus, Terence and Phaedrus, were slaves, -- but they were of the race of
whites. It is not their condition then, but nature, which has
produced the distinction." See this, my brethren! ! Do you believe that
this assertion is swallowed by millions of the whites? Do you know that Mr.
Jefferson was one of as great characters as ever lived among the whites? See
his writings for the world, and public labours for the United States of
America. Do you believe that the assertions of such a man, will pass away into
oblivion unobserved by this people and the world? If you do you are much
mistaken-See how the American people treat us -- have we souls in our bodies?
Are we men who have any spirits at all? I know that there are many swell-bellied
fellows among us, whose greatest object is to fill their stomachs. Such I do
not mean -- I am after those who know and feel, that we are MEN, as well as
other people; to them, I say, that unless we try to refute Mr. Jefferson's
arguments respecting us, we will only establish them.
Are we MEN! ! -- I ask
you, 0 my brethren I are we MEN? Did our Creator make us to be slaves to dust
and ashes like ourselves? Are they not dying worms as well as we? Have they not
to make their appearance before the tribunal of Heaven, to answer for the deeds
done in the body, as well as we? Have we any other Master but Jesus Christ
alone? Is he not their Master as well as ours? -- What right then, have we to
obey and call any other Master, but Himself? How we could be so submissive
to a gang of men, whom we cannot tell whether they are as good as ourselves or
not, I never could conceive. However, this is shut up with the Lord, and we
cannot precisely tell -- but I declare, we judge men by their works. The whites
have always been an unjust, jealous, unmerciful, avaricious and blood-thirsty
set of beings, always seeking after power and authority.
...to my no ordinary
astonishment, [a] Reverend gentleman got up and told us (coloured people) that
slaves must be obedient to their masters -- must do their duty to their masters
or be whipped -- the whip was made for the backs of fools, &c. Here I pause
for a moment, to give the world time to consider what was my surprise, to hear
such preaching from a minister of my Master, whose very gospel is that of peace
and not of blood and whips, as this pretended preacher tried to make us
believe. What the American preachers can think of us, I aver this day before my
God, I have never been able to define. They have newspapers and monthly
periodicals, which they receive in continual succession, but on the pages of
which, you will scarcely ever find a paragraph respecting slavery, which is ten
thousand times more injurious to this country than all the other evils put
together; and which will be the final overthrow of its government, unless
something is very speedily done; for their cup is nearly full.-Perhaps they
will laugh at or make light of this; but I tell you Americans! that unless you
speedily alter your course, you and your Country are gone! ! ! ! !
Let no man of us budge one step, and let slave-holders come to beat us from
our country. America is more our country, than it is the whites-we have
enriched it with our blood and tears. The greatest riches in all America
have arisen from our blood and tears: -- and will they drive us from our
property and homes, which we have earned with our blood? They must look
sharp or this very thing will bring swift destruction upon them. The Americans
have got so fat on our blood and groans, that they have almost forgotten the
God of armies. But let the go on.
Surely, the Americans must think that we are
brutes, as some of them have represented us to be. They think that we do not
feel for our brethren, whom they are murdering by the inches, but they are
dreadfully deceived.
I declare to you, while you keep us and our children in
bondage, and treat us like brutes, to make us support you and your families, we
cannot be your friends. You do not look for it do you? Treat us then like men,
and we will be your friends. And there is not a doubt in my mind, but that the
whole of the past will be sunk into oblivion, and we yet, under God, will
become a united and happy people. The whites may say it is impossible, but
remember that nothing is impossible with God.
You want slaves, and want us
for your slaves ! ! ! My colour will yet, root some of you out of the very face
of the earth ! ! ! ! ! ! You may doubt it if you please. I know that thousands
will doubt-they think they have us so well secured in wretchedness, to them and
their children, that it is impossible for such things to occur.
See your Declaration Americans! ! ! Do you
understand your won language? Hear your languages, proclaimed to the world,
July 4th, 1776 -- "We hold these truths to be self evident -- that ALL MEN
ARE CREATED EQUAL! ! that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness! !" Compare your own language above, extracted from
your Declaration of Independence, with your cruelties and murders inflicted by
your cruel and unmerciful fathers and yourselves on our fathers and on us --
men who have never given your fathers or you the least provocation! ! ! ! ! !
7. Lewis Clarke
Lewis Clarke, the son of a Scottish weaver and a slave mother, was born
in Kentucky in 1815. Despite an agreement that she was to be freed upon her
husband's death, Clarke's mother and her nine children remained in slavery.
After he learned that he was going to be sold in New Orleans, Clarke
successfully fled through Ohio across Lake Erie to Canada in 1841. In an
account of his life published in 1846, he provided answers to questions he was
frequently asked about the impact of slavery upon slave families.
[Question] Are families often separated? How many such cases have you
personally known?
[Answer] I never knew a whole family to live together till all were
grown up in my life. There is almost always, in every family, some one or more
keen and bright, or else sullen and stubborn slave, whose influence they are
afraid of on the rest of the family, and such a one must take a walking ticket
to the south.
There are other causes of separation. The death of a large owner
is the occasion usually of many families being broken up. Bankruptcy is another
cause of separation, and the hard-heartedness of a majority of slave-holders
another and a more fruitful cause than either or all the rest. Generally there
is but little more scruple about separating families than there is with a man
who keeps sheep in selling off the lambs in the fall. On one plantation where I
lived, there was an old slave named Paris. He was from fifty to sixty years
old, and a very honest and apparently pious slave. A slave-trader came along
one day, to gather hands for the south. The old master ordered the waiter or
coachman to take Paris into the back room pluck out all his gray hairs, rub his
face with a greasy towel, and then had him brought forward and sold for a young
man. His wife consented to go with him, upon a promise from the trader that
they should be sold together, with their youngest child, which she carried in
her arms. They left two behind them, who were only from four to six or eight
years of age. The speculator collected his drove, started for the market, and,
before he left the state, he sold that infant child to pay one of his tavern
bills, and took the balance in cash....
[Question] Have you ever known a slave mother to kill her own children?
[Answer] There was a slave mother near where I lived, who took her
child into the cellar and killed it. She did it to prevent being separated from
her child. Another slave mother took her three children and threw them into a
well, and then jumped in with them, and they were all drowned. Other instances
I have frequently heard of. At the death of many and many a slave child, I have
seen the two feelings struggling in the bosom of a mother -- joy, that it was
beyond the reach of the slave monsters, and the natural grief of a mother over
her child. In the presence of the master, grief seems to predominate; when away
from them, they rejoice that there is one whom the slave-killer will never
torment.
Source: Interesting Memoirs and Documents Relating to American Slavery,
and the Glorious
Struggle Now Making for Complete Emancipation (London, 1846)
8. Thomas James
Thomas James was an African-American minister sent by the American
Missionary Society to care for the families of black Union soldiers in
Louisville. He gave this stirring account of the conditions for slaves and
freedmen in Louisville during the Civil War.
I returned to Rochester in 1856, and took charge of the colored church
in this city. In 1862 I received an appointment from the American Missionary
Society to labor among the colored people of Tennessee and Louisiana, but I
never reached either of these states. I left Rochester with my daughter, and
reported at St. Louis, where I received orders to proceed to Louisville,
Kentucky. On the train, between St. Louis and Louisville, a party of forty
Missouri ruffians entered the car at an intermediate station, and threatened to
throw me and my daughter off the train. They robbed me of my watch. The
conductor undertook to protect us, but, finding it out of his power, brought a
number of Government officers and passengers from the next car to our
assistance. At Louisville the government took me out of the hands of the
Missionary Society to take charge of freed and refugee blacks, to visit the
prisons of that commonwealth, and to set free all colored persons found
confined without charge of crime. I served first under the orders of General
Burbage, and then under those of his successor, General Palmer. The homeless
colored people, for whom I was to care, were gathered in a camp covering ten
acres of ground on the outskirts of the city. They were housed in light
buildings, and supplied with rations from the commissary stores. Nearly all the
persons in the camp were women and children, for the colored men were sworn
into the United States service as soldiers as fast as they came in.
My first duty, after arranging the affairs of the camp, was to visit
the slave pens, of which there were five in the city. The largest, known as
Garrison's, was located on Market Street, and to that I made my first visit.
When I entered it, and was about to make a thorough inspection of it, Garrison
stopped me with the insolent remark, "I guess no nigger will go over me in
this pen." I showed him my orders, whereupon he asked time to consult the
mayor. He started for the entrance, but was stopped by the guard I had
stationed there. I told him he would not leave the pen until I had gone through
every part of it. "So," said I, "throw open your doors, or I
will put you under arrest." I found hidden away in that pen 260 colored
persons, part of them in irons. I took them all to my camp, and they were free.
I next called at Otterman's pen on Second Street, from which also I took a
large number of slaves. A third large pen was named Clark's, and there were two
smaller ones besides. I liberated the slaves in all of them. One morning it was
reported to me that a slave trader had nine colored men locked in a room in the
National hotel. A waiter from the hotel brought the information at daybreak. I
took a squad of soldiers with me to the place, and demanded the surrender of
the blacks. The clerk said there were none in the house. Their owners had gone
off with "the boys" at daybreak. I answered that I could take no
man's word in such a case, but must see for myself. When I was about to begin
the search, a colored man secretly gave me the number of the room the men were
in. The room was locked, and the porter refused to give up the keys. A threat
to place him under arrest brought him to reason, and I found the colored men
inside, as I had anticipated.
One of them, an old man, who sat with his face between his hands, said
as I entered: "So'thin' tole me last night that so'thin' was a goin' to
happen to me." That very day I mustered the nine men into the service of
the government, and that made them free men.
So much anger was excited by these proceedings, that the mayor and
common council of Louisville visited General Burbage at his headquarters, and
warned him that if I was not sent away within forty-eight hours my life would
pay the forfeit. The General sternly answered them: "If James is killed, I
will hold responsible for the act every man who fills an office under your city
government. I will hang them all higher than Haman was hung, and I have 15,000
troops behind me to carry out the order. Your only salvation lies in protecting
this colored man's life."
During my first year and a half at Louisville, a guard was stationed at
the door of my room every night, as a necessary precaution in view of the
threats of violence of which I was the object. One night I received a
suggestive hint of the treatment the rebel sympathizers had in store for me
should I chance to fall into their hands. A party of them approached the house
where I was lodged protected by a guard. The soldiers, who were new recruits,
ran off in afright. I found escape by the street cut off, and as I ran for the
rear alley I discovered that avenue also guarded by a squad of my enemies. As a
last resort I jumped a side fence, and stole along until out of sight and
hearing of the enemy. Making my way to the house of a colored man named White,
I exchanged my uniform for an old suit of his, and then, sallying forth,
mingled with the rebel party, to learn, if possible, the nature of their
intentions. Not finding me, and not having noticed my escape, they concluded
that they must have been misinformed as to my lodging place for that night.
Leaving the locality they proceeded to the house of another friend of mine,
named Bridle, whose home was on Tenth Street. After vainly searching every room
in Bridle's house, they dispersed with the threat that if they got me I should
hang to the nearest lamp-post. For a long time after I was placed in charge of
the camp, I was forced to forbid the display of lights in any of the buildings
at night, for fear of drawing the fire of rebel bushwhackers. All the fugitives
in the camp made their beds on the floor, to escape danger from rifle balls
fired through the thin siding of the frame structures.
I established a Sunday and a day school in my camp and held religious
services twice a week as well as on Sundays. I was ordered by General Palmer to
marry every colored woman that came into camp to a soldier unless she objected
to such a proceeding. The ceremony was a mere form to secure the freedom of the
female colored refugees; for Congress had passed a law giving freedom to the
wives and children of all colored soldiers and sailors in the service of the
government. The emancipation proclamation, applying as it did only to states in
rebellion, failed to meet the case of slaves in Kentucky, and we were obliged
to resort to this ruse to escape the necessity of giving up to their masters
many of the runaway slave women and children who flocked to our camp.
I had a contest of this kind with a slave trader known as Bill Hurd. He
demanded the surrender of a colored woman in my camp who claimed her freedom on
the plea that her husband had enlisted in the federal army. She wished to go to
Cincinnati, and General Palmer, giving me a railway pass for her, cautioned me
to see her on board the cars for the North before I left her. At the levee I
saw Hurd and a policeman, and suspecting that they intended a rescue, I left
the girl with the guard at the river and returned to the general for a detail
of one or more men.
During my absence Hurd claimed the woman from the guard and the latter
brought all the parties to the provost marshal's headquarters, although I had
directed him to report to General Palmer with the woman in case of trouble; for
I feared that the provost marshal's sympathies were on the slave owner's side.
I met Hurd, the policeman and the woman at the corner of Sixth and Green
streets and halted them. Hurd said the provost marshal had decided that she was
his property. I answered -- what I had just learned that the provost marshal
was not at his headquarters and that his subordinate had no authority to decide
such a case. I said further that I had orders to take the party before General
Palmer and proposed to do it. They saw it was not prudent to resist, as I had a
guard to enforce the order.
When the parties were heard before the general, Hurd said the girl had
obtained her freedom and a pass by false pretenses. She was his property; he
had paid $500 for her; she was single when he bought her and she had not
married since. Therefore she could claim no rights under the law giving freedom
to the wives of colored soldiers. The general answered that the charge of false
pretenses was a criminal one and the woman would be held for trial upon it. "But,"
said Hurd, "she is my property and I want her." "No,"
answered the general, "we keep our own prisoners." The general said
to me privately, after Hurd was gone: "The woman has a husband in our
service and I know it; but never mind that. We'll beat these rebels at their
own game." Hurd hung about headquarters two or three days until General
Palmer said finally: "I have no time to try this case; take it before the
provost marshal." The latter, who had been given the hint, delayed action
for several days more, and then turned over the case to General Dodge. After
another delay, which still further tortured the slave trader, General Dodge
said to me one day: "James, bring Mary to my headquarters, supply her with
rations, have a guard ready, and call Hurd as a witness." When the slave
trader had made his statement to the same effect as before, General Dodge
delivered judgment in the following words: "Hurd, you are an honest man.
It is a clear case. All I have to do, Mary, is to sentence you to keep away
from this department during the remainder of the present war. James, take her
across the river and see her on board the cars." "But, general,"
whined Hurd, "that won't do. I shall lose her services if you send her
north." "You have nothing to do with it; you are only a witness in
this case," answered the general. I carried out the order strictly, to
remain with Mary until the cars started; and under the protection of a file of
guards, she was soon placed on the train en route for Cincinnati.
Among the slaves I rescued and brought to the refugee camp was a girl
named Laura, who had been locked up by her mistress in a cellar and left to
remain there two days and as many nights without food or drink. Two refugee
slave women were seen by their master making toward my camp, and calling upon a
policeman he had then seized and taken to the house of his brother-in-law on
Washington street. When the facts were reported to me, I took a squad of guards
to the house and rescued them. As I came out of the house with the slave women,
their master asked me: "What are you going to do with them?" I
answered that they would probably take care of themselves. He protested that he
had always used the runaway women well, and appealing to one of them, asked:
"Have I not, Angelina?" I directed the woman to answer the question,
saying that she had as good a right to speak as he had, and that I would
protect her in that right. She then said: "He tied my dress over my head
Sunday and whipped me for refusing to carry victuals to the bushwhackers and
guerrillas in the woods." I brought the women to camp, and soon afterwards
sent them north to find homes. I sent one girl rescued by me under somewhat
similar circumstances as far as this city to find a home with Colonel Klinck's
family.
Up to that time in my career I had never received serious injury at any
man's hands. I was several times reviled and hustled by mobs in my first tour
of the district about the city of Rochester, and once when I was lecturing in
New Hampshire a reckless, half-drunken fellow in the lobby fired a pistol at
me, the ball shattering the plaster a few feet from my head. But, as I said, I
had never received serious injury. Now, however, I received a blow, the effects
of which I shall carry to my grave. General Palmer sent me to the shop of a
blacksmith who was suspected of bushwhacking, with an order requiring the
latter to report at headquarters. The rebel, who was a powerful man, raised a
short iron bar as I entered and aimed a savage blow at my head. By an
instinctive movement I saved my life, but the blow fell on my neck and
shoulders, and I was for a long time afterwards disabled by the injury. My
right hand remains partially paralyzed and almost wholly useless to this day.
Many a sad scene I witnessed at my camp of colored refugees in
Louisville. There was the mother bereaved of her children, who had been sold
and sent farther South lest they should escape in the general rush for the
federal lines and freedom; children, orphaned in fact if not in name, for
separation from parents among the colored people in those days left no hope of
reunion this side the grave; wives forever parted from their husbands, and
husbands who might never hope to catch again the brightening eye and the
welcoming smile of the help-mates whose hearts God and nature had joined to
theirs. Such recollections come fresh to me when with trembling voice I sing
the old familiar song of anti-slavery days:
Oh deep was the anguish of the slave mother's heart
When called from
her darling forever to part;
So grieved that lone mother, that broken-hearted
mother
In sorrow and woe.
The child was borne off to a far-distant clime
While the mother was left in anguish to pine;
But reason departed, and she
sank broken-hearted
In sorrow and woe.
I remained at Louisville a little over three years, staying for some
months after the war closed in charge of the colored camp, the hospital,
dispensary and government stores.
Wonderful Eventful Life of Rev. Thomas James, by himself
Third
Edition, Rochester, NY: Post-Express Printing Company, Mill Street. 1887.
9. George Browder
George Browder was a slave-holding minister in Logan County. This is
his account of the day all his slaves ran away.
June 8, 1864
A day of strange feelings! Found my plantation entirely deserted by negroes
- not one left! Abram, Bob, Jeff, George & Ellen, Dolly Underwood, William,
Ida, Nicholas, & Lucy all gone! Took my wagon, old carriage, two horses
& two mules. We felt lighter some how than usual, felt poorer, but freer,
more dependent, yet more self-reliant. Lizzie got breakfast & I milked the
cows. The children seemed gleeful & at the family prayer we earnestly
involved Gods blessing guidance and good providence in our new circumstances.
William & I with a number of others set out in search of our horses and
wagons. Ten negroes left me -- 3 from father -- 8 from Nelson Waters -- six
from McCulloch, 3 from John Vick & others in a different neighborhood. We
met part of the troop arrested and brought back -- & had a vast deal of
trouble and vexation in separated & deciding what to do with them. George
& Ellen & all mine except Jeff and Abe escaped leaving their clothes
& all their goods. We put the men under guard to send to Louisville &
just as my wagon and carriage got in with the baggage, my brother William came
with all the rest of the fugitives -- looking worn, sad and confounded. They
had been overtaken in a few miles of Clarksville. We whipped Jeff & Bob
& Lucy, & Ellen made herself sick -- quite sick -- in the long tramp
through heat, mud & rain, after they left the wagons.
Poor unfortunate creatures, how I pity them, deceived & misled as
they have been, yet listening to strangers rather than those who have raised
& cared for them. They have been greatly abused in their minds. I should
have been glad if they had gotten safe into Clarksville without my
responsibility.
The Heavens Are Weeping: The Diaries of George R. Browder
Edited by
Richard R. Troutman
Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Books. 1987.
10. Jane Giles
Jane Giles was a slave belonging to Margaret Preston of Lexington.
While on a trip to New York, Jane ran away. Later she wrote to her former
mistress to explain why. Another letter tells us that life as a free African
American during these times was not comfortable. These letters were not written
during the Civil War, but six years before.
Jane Giles (New York) to Margaret Wickliffe Preston
(Washington D.C.),
February 8th 1854
Mrs William Preston
Madam. I take this oppertunity to wright you these few lines to inform
you that I am well at this time and I hope you are the same. Dear madam I
sopose you wonder why that I left you. Well I will tell you the Reason one
Reason was because you Parted me and my housbond as tho we had no feeling and
the Next Reason was because you accused me of stealing Money and I was not
gilty of it but because I am coulard You sopose that I have not got any
feelings I have feelings thank god as well as you and I sopose you feel the
Loss of me as much as I do the loss of you. I worked for you when I was with
you and dear madam I am working for my Sealf and let me inform you that I Loved
my housbond as well as you do yours if I never see him again in this world but
I am in hopes to meet him in Haven
I sopose you will call this impedance But I do not I have nothing
Against Mr. Preston he treated me well he would not have sent my husbound away
had it not been for you and I would have been yet with you. But Never mind
Every boddy must have trubble
I Remane Yours
Jane Giles (Box 49)
11. John Fee
John Fee was a minister who was sent to tend to the needs of the
families of African-American soldiers who enlisted in the Union army at Camp
Nelson.
There was another phase of the work at Camp Nelson, then of interest to
me, and connected by principle and effect with the work at Berea. The
enlistment of colored men at Camp Nelson was soon followed by the coming of
their wives and children. These were at first driven out of the camp at the
point of the bayonet. Thus sent back, they were exposed to the cruelty of their
former masters. I saw indignation rising in the hearts and showing itself in the
actions of the colored soldiers. I went to the officials and said to them,
"This driving back of wives and children will breed mutiny in your camp
unless you desist." The reply was, "What will you do? - will you
leave the women and children with the soldiers? That will never do." I
said, "No; I would draw a picket line and put the women in the west end of
the camp, which is abundantly large and encircled by Kentucky river and cliffs
four hundred feet high. Such a natural fortification, high, beautiful, and well-watered,
was not anywhere else found in the State." "But," said the
Quartermaster, "I can do nothing in the way of shelter without an order
from the Secretary of War." I replied, "I know Secretary Chase
personally. I will prepare a paper to be sent to his care." "Do
so," said the Quartermaster, "and I will sign it." The paper was
forwarded. Quickly an order came from Stanton, the Secretary of War, for the
construction of buildings; and in a short time the Quartermaster had ninety-two
cottages erected as homes for families, two larger buildings as hospitals for
sick women and children, and other buildings as school-rooms and offices,
boarding hall, and dormitory for teachers, steward and family.
From Autobiography of John Fee
12.
TABLE 2
Population of the South 1790-1860 by type
|
Year
|
White
|
Free Nonwhite
|
Slave
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
1790
|
1,240,454
|
32,523
|
654,121
|
|
1800
|
1,691,892
|
61,575
|
851,532
|
|
1810
|
2,118,144
|
97,284
|
1,103,700
|
|
1820
|
2,867,454
|
130,487
|
1,509,904
|
|
1830
|
3,614,600
|
175,074
|
1,983,860
|
|
1840
|
4,601,873
|
207,214
|
2,481,390
|
|
1850
|
6,184,477
|
235,821
|
3,200,364
|
|
1860
|
8,036,700
|
253,082
|
3,950,511
|
Source: Historical Statistics of the U.S.
(1970).
Holdings of Southern Slaveowners
by states, 1860
|
State
|
Total
|
Held 1
|
Held 2
|
Held 3
|
Held 4
|
Held 5
|
Held 1-5
|
Held 100-
|
Held 500+
|
|
|
slaveholders
|
slave
|
slaves
|
Slaves
|
slaves
|
slaves
|
slaves
|
499 slaves
|
slaves
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
AL
|
33,730
|
5,607
|
3,663
|
2,805
|
2,329
|
1,986
|
16,390
|
344
|
-
|
|
AR
|
11,481
|
2,339
|
1,503
|
1,070
|
894
|
730
|
6,536
|
65
|
1
|
|
DE
|
587
|
237
|
114
|
74
|
51
|
34
|
510
|
-
|
-
|
|
FL
|
5,152
|
863
|
568
|
437
|
365
|
285
|
2,518
|
47
|
-
|
|
GA
|
41,084
|
6,713
|
4,335
|
3,482
|
2,984
|
2,543
|
20,057
|
211
|
8
|
|
KY
|
38,645
|
9,306
|
5,430
|
4,009
|
3,281
|
2,694
|
24,720
|
7
|
-
|
|
LA
|
22,033
|
4,092
|
2,573
|
2,034
|
1,536
|
1,310
|
11,545
|
543
|
4
|
|
MD
|
13,783
|
4,119
|
1,952
|
1,279
|
1,023
|
815
|
9,188
|
16
|
-
|
|
MS
|
30,943
|
4,856
|
3,201
|
2,503
|
2,129
|
1,809
|
14,498
|
315
|
1
|
|
MO
|
24,320
|
6,893
|
3,754
|
2,773
|
2,243
|
1,686
|
17,349
|
4
|
-
|
|
NC
|
34,658
|
6,440
|
4,017
|
3,068
|
2,546
|
2,245
|
18,316
|
133
|
-
|
|
SC
|
26,701
|
3,763
|
2,533
|
1,990
|
1,731
|
1,541
|
11,558
|
441
|
8
|
|
TN
|
36,844
|
7,820
|
4,738
|
3,609
|
3,012
|
2,536
|
21,715
|
47
|
-
|
|
TX
|
21,878
|
4,593
|
2,874
|
2,093
|
1,782
|
1,439
|
12,781
|
54
|
-
|
|
VA
|
52,128
|
11,085
|
5,989
|
4,474
|
3,807
|
3,233
|
28,588
|
114
|
-
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
TOTAL
|
393,967
|
78,726
|
47,244
|
35,700
|
29,713
|
24,886
|
216,269
|
2,341
|
22
|
Source: Historical Statistics of the
United States (1970).
|
Source 13.
 |
The slaves of George Washington must have found the hours when they were
not working for their master very precious, for it was then they had the time
and the freedom to pursue their own interests and to exercise some measure of
control over their own lives. Evenings, Sundays, and holidays (Christmas,
Easter Monday, the Monday after Pentecost, and official days of prayer and
fasting), the African Americans at Mount Vernon occupied themselves with
activities to benefit themselves and their families, rather than their master.
Slaves on the four outlying farms of the Mount Vernon estate may have had even
more freedom in their private lives than those residing at the Mansion House
(Mount Vernon), where personal servants had to be available well into the
evening, and where opportunities for close supervision by the master and his
family abounded. However, even in their free time and in the most personal
aspects of their lives, Washington's slaves were never free of his ultimate control.
At the height of its development as a plantation, Mount Vernon comprised
eight thousand acres divided into five separate farms-- Mansion House, Dogue
Run, Union, Muddy Hole, and River--each of which contained a small village of
African-born and Virginia-born slaves. By the time of Washington's death in
1799, roughly ninety percent of the plantation's population consisted of over
three hundred African American slaves (forty of whom Washington rented from a
neighbor); the remaining ten percent were the Washington family, white hired
workers, and their families.
The largest slave community, ninety people, lived at Mansion House Farm,
many of them artisans who practiced the multiple crafts needed to supply the
plantation and keep it running. The group included tradesmen such as
bricklayers and carpenters; cooks, dairy maids, gardeners, millers, and
distillers, who produced and processed the food; people who made clothes for
the other slaves; ditchdiggers; wagon and cart drivers and postilions for the
carriages; and the butlers, maids, and footmen who worked in the mansion. The
other slave villages ranged in size from forty-five residents at Dogue Run and
fifty-seven at River to forty-one at Muddy Hole and seventy-six at Union. Most
of the workers on the outlying farms labored in the fields.
During their time off, most people probably tried to catch up on their
rest, given the usual dawn-to-dusk, six-day work week. The number of personal
things to be done and the limited time in which to do them, however, meant that
the slaves' few available free hours were probably fairly busy. Among the most
important activities on a daily basis were housekeeping chores, such as tending
chickens and garden plots, cooking and preserving the produce of those gardens,
and caring for clothing. The latter activity was a special concern to George
Washington, because his slaves sometimes mended their clothes with fabric
intended for other purposes. For instance, in 1792, farm manager Anthony
In the fall of 1798, Mount Vernon's farm manager, James Anderson, placed
a notice in a local paper about a pocketbook that a slave had found along the
road outside of Alexandria. The rightful owner, after proving that it was his,
could reclaim his property after paying for the advertisement and "allowing
something for the Negro who found it."
A slave might receive a tip for special services. In the spring of 1768,
when George Washington left the home of his brother-in-law, Burwell Bassett, he
was probably acting properly when he left fifteen shillings and nine pence for
the "Servants," who would have had extra duties to perform in caring
for him or for any other houseguest. When a slave who belonged to overseer
James Cleveland returned a horse to Mount Vernon in the summer of 1783, he received
three shillings, which he could, presumably, spend as he wished. In 1785
Washington gave several slaves six shillings in gratitude for their assistance
in getting his valet, William Lee, to the home of a friend, Dr. David Stuart,
after Lee broke his kneecap while surveying with Washington. (It is unclear
whether the people were from Mount Vernon or from Stuart's home, or if they
just happened upon the accident.) Washington's contemporaries, benefitting from
the help of one of his slaves, would quite likely have tipped them as well.
George Washington purchased foodstuffs from not only his own slaves, but
from those on neighboring farms as well. Eggs, chickens, ducks, melons,
cucumbers, and honey all found their way from the quarters to the mansion table
over the years. Washington's slaves also sold their chickens in Alexandria, in
order to "procure for themselves a few amenities," wrote Julian Ursyn
Niemcewicz, a Polish traveler who visited Mount Vernon in early June of 1798.
(Like many European tourists, he was fascinated by the institution of slavery
and recorded in his journal a number of observations about George Washington's
slaves, which have proven invaluable to later researchers.) Other slaves made
small items for sale to the Washington household; in 1792, a slave named Easter
received sixpence in exchange for a broom, which had presumably been crafted in
the quarters.
While slaves may have sold some of their things door-to-door in the
neighborhood, they found another destination for their goods and foodstuffs at
the Sunday market in Alexandria, nine miles away, where slaves from the
surrounding countryside could sell until 9:00 in the morning. Of course, this
meant an early morning for anyone trying to get into the city, which was a trip
of one-and-a-half to two hours on horseback, two-and-a-half or three hours on
foot. The financial and social rewards, however, must have made the effort
worthwhile. In addition to serving as a means of making money, the Sunday
market was a good place to befriend slaves from Alexandria and from outlying
plantations. Toward the end of George Washington's life, farm manager James
Anderson tightened the privilege a bit by requiring that slaves from Mount
Vernon have a special pass in order to do business at the market. Anderson was not
simply being capricious but was complying with a Virginia law of 1785 that
forbid sales to or purchases from slaves without the permission of their owner
or overseer.
The leisure pursuits of fishing and hunting could also lead to financial
improvement. Washington's fondness for fish was well-known, even outside his
household, so he was a likely customer for anyone with an impressive catch to
sell. In the late summer of 1790, he paid three shillings to "a Negroe of
Capt. Marshals" for two rockfish. The Mount Vernon slaves hunted and
trapped animals for income, both physical and documentary evidence suggests.
Within the past decade, archaeologists working in the cellar of a slave
dwelling on the Mansion House Farm came across both gun flints and lead shot in
a variety of sizes; remains of small mammals (rabbits, squirrels, opossums, and
raccoons); and a variety of wild birds (several types of ducks, coot, grouse,
partridge, and passenger pigeon). Contrary to popular belief, slaves could
legally own guns under certain circumstances. A Virginia statute of 1785 forbid
slaves to keep firearms unless they were either traveling with their master or
had written permission from him or their employer to have a gun. Washington
clearly knew about and sanctioned the keeping of guns by at least some of his
slaves (although no such documents of permission appear at Mount Vernon). He
even provided shot on occasion, most likely for hunting game for the
Washingtons' table or for hunting vermin, as on 19 January 1787, when slave Tom
Davis received one pound of shot.
In the fall of 1792, Davis and another slave, Sambo Anderson, sold their
master eleven dozen birds. Both men were well-known hunters. Davis, who
regularly supplied the Mount Vernon household with fresh game, had a "great
Newfoundland dog" named Gunner as his hunting companion. Ducks were
extremely plentiful along the Potomac in the eighteenth century, and one shot
from Davis's "old British musket" generally brought down "as
many of those delicious birds as would supply the larder for a week," said
George Washington Parke Custis, Martha Washington's grandson. Anderson had been
born in Africa and in the 1750s had been enslaved and brought to Virginia,
where he became a carpenter. A vivid character, he wore gold rings in his ears
and adorned his face with tribal scars and tattoos. After his manumission in
1800 under the terms of Washington's will, Anderson supported himself by
hunting wild game, which he sold to hotels and to "the most respectable
families" in Alexandria, according to an 1876 correspondent to the Alexandria
Gazette and Virginia Advertiser. He made enough money from this endeavor to
purchase and emancipate two members of his family, William and Eliza. Sambo
Anderson probably earned money from those same sources while Washington was
alive.
Slaves of the eighteenth century sometimes turned to the perfectly
acceptable means of making money by selling their teeth to dentists. Since at
least the end of the Middle Ages, poor people had often sold their teeth for use
in both dentures and in tooth-transplant operations for those wealthy enough to
afford the procedures. Sometimes the teeth were perfectly healthy; others were
diseased and needed to be pulled anyway. In 1780 a French dentist named Jean
Pierre Le Moyer (also called Le Mayeaur, Le Mayeur, and Joseph Lemaire) came to
America, possibly as a naval surgeon with the French forces commanded by the
Comte de Rochambeau, and over the next decade treated patients in New York,
Philadelphia, Baltimore, Alexandria, and Richmond. He seems to have had an
extensive practice in tooth transplants, but the results of the procedure were
short-lived, usually less than one or two years. Transplantable teeth were hard
to come by, and in 1783 Le Moyer even went so far as to advertise in the New
York papers for "persons disposed to sell their front teeth, or any of
them," netting the donor two guineas (forty-two shillings) per tooth. In
Richmond, he offered anyone but slaves a similar amount for their front teeth.
Technical problems made it impossible to transplant molars, so the operation
was probably useful primarily for cosmetic reasons. Le Moyer first treated
George Washington's teeth at his military headquarters in 1783.
The ways the slaves at Mount Vernon spent the money they earned was as
varied as the individual people themselves, with better clothing, extra food,
and household goods among the possibilities. When the Washingtons' cook,
Hercules, accompanied them to Philadelphia during the presidency, he made a
good deal of money, the equivalent of one hundred to two hundred dollars a year
in late-eighteenth-century currency, by selling leftovers from the kitchen. His
freedom to sell remnants of food preparation was probably a holdover of a
perquisite allowed to cooks and other domestic servants in England, who
traditionally sold such items as animal skins, feathers, tallow, and tea leaves
to supplement their income. Hercules "lavished the most of these large
avails upon dress," according to George Washington Parke Custis. "In
making his toilet his linen was of unexceptionable whiteness and quality, then
black silk shorts, ditto waistcoat, ditto stockings, shoes highly polished,
with large buckles covering a considerable part of the foot, blue cloth coat
with velvet collar and bright metal buttons, a long watch-chain dangling from
his fob, a cocked-hat, and gold-headed cane completed the grand costume."
Hercules was hardly the only slave at Mount Vernon to spend his money on
clothing. In 1786 on an Alexandria street, one of the seamstresses, Charlotte,
became embroiled in an altercation with the wife of Charles MacIver over a
dress in Charlotte's possession, the same dress that someone else had stolen
from Mrs. MacIver two years earlier. Charlotte may have been the last of
several slaves to purchase the dress after its theft and its use as an item of
barter.
Other individuals spent their money on food, usually in the form of
supplies that were better than their usual rations. Slaves purchased from
Washington in the last years of his life fine flour, large quantities of pork,
and whiskey. Also, they likely bought imported foods, such as tea, coffee,
molasses, and sugar, from shops in Alexandria.
In addition to making money, the slaves at Mount Vernon spent their free
time just having fun. One favorite activity was visiting with one another at
night, after they had finished the day's labor. In 1794 Washington asked
manager William Pearce to caution the slaves at the Mansion House Farm of fire,
"for it is no uncommon thing for them to be running from one house to
another in cold windy nights with sparks of fire flying, and dropping as they
go along." He complained that the slaves were too exhausted after what he
called "night walking" to do the work expected of them.
Children may have made extended visits to relatives on other farms. In
1786, three young, unattached children lived at Washington's River Farm.
Seven-year-old Milly and four-year-old Billy both had mothers, Sall and
Charlotte, at the Mansion House Farm, while James, who was eight, was the child
of Doll at another farm. These children were too young to be part of the work
force, so their absence from home was not a matter of serious concern to the
plantation's management, as long as their whereabouts were generally known. It
was no doubt a serious concern to their parents.
Many husbands and wives at Mount Vernon endured separation because of
their work assignments, spending weekdays on the five different farms. Still
others were married to people who lived on plantations belonging to other
owners. With Sunday the weekly day off for everyone except possibly house
servants, the individuals involved in long-distance marriages could see one
another, and their children, only on Saturday night and during the day on
Sunday, as well as during other holidays. A master, however, could always
curtail such arrangements. In the fall of 1769, Washington became quite annoyed
with his neighbor, John Posey, because he had "under very frivolous
presences forbid two or three of my People who had Wives in his Family from
coming there again," Washington told merchant Hector Ross. In 1793 during
the presidency, Washington felt that affairs at Mount Vernon were getting out
of control in his absence, so he ordered his farm manager there, Anthony Whiting,
to "absolutely forbid the Slaves of others resorting to the Mansion house;
such only excepted as have wives or husbands there, or such as you may
particularly license from a knowledge of their being honest and well
disposed." Whiting, after giving them a warning, was to punish all others
"whensoever you shall find them transgressing these orders."
George Washington himself ended the marriage of one of his slaves. In
February 1795, he learned that a woman named Fanny at River Farm was "Laid
up" for an entire six-day work week because she had been "badly
beat" by her husband, Ben, who was owned by a Mr. Fowler. Washington was
so incensed that he refused to allow Ben on the plantation and ordered him
whipped if he disobeyed. (Within four years Fanny remarried, once again to a
slave living off the Mount Vernon estate. This unnamed second husband belonged
to a Mr. Alexander.)
The slaves may well have accompanied their visits to friends and loved
ones with music, smoking, and storytelling. Archaeologists digging at the site
of the original blacksmith shop have found a mouth harp, also known as a Jew's
harp, which either a slave or a white servant could have played without special
training. The cellar of an excavated slave quarter on the Mansion House Farm
has yielded large numbers of clay pipe fragments, which both men and women used
for smoking tobacco. A number of the plantation's slaves had been born in
Africa, and one of them, the elderly fisherman known as Father Jack, told
stories about that far-off and exotic place to young George Washington Parke
Custis, who recalled as an adult that Father Jack was an African negro, an
hundred years of age, and, although greatly enfeebled in body by such a vast
weight of years, his mind possessed uncommon vigor. And he would tell of days
long past, of Afric's clime, and of Afric's wars, in which he (of course the
son of a king) was made captive, and of the terrible battle in which his royal
sire was slain, the village consigned to the flames, and he to the slaveship.
If Jack told such stories to the master's little grandson, he and other
slaves surely related similar tales to the children of their own families. In
doing so, they passed on cultural values, built pride, and gave the children a
historical framework for their lives. All of these things were instrumental in
fashioning a community within the quarters, where the first generation of inhabitants
had originally come from Africa and from widely differing locales within
Virginia.
The slaves at Mount Vernon also found time for games and sports in their
free hours. Small African American boys of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries made marbles their favorite game, and they may have continued the
pastime into adulthood, adding the dimension of gambling to the sport. The
cellar of a two-story structure, which housed slave families on the Mansion
House Farm for about three decades in the eighteenth century, yielded clay
marbles to archaeologists digging in 1984.
Swimming in the Potomac River and the many creeks on the plantation
provided some degree of relief from the oppressive heat and humidity of the
Virginia summer. In the late summer of 1778, a slave named James provided sad
proof of this pastime. After spending the morning ditching the swamp, James (a
cooper and one of Washington's "most valuable slaves," according to
Lund Washington) and the men with whom he was working stopped for their midday
dinner break. He finished eating before the others and went to cool off in the
nearby millrace, leaving his breeches on the bank. The mill was not running and
there was no current in the race that day, so James, who could not swim and so
feared the water that he never went in farther than waist deep, must have felt
comfortable. He did not realize that the millrace was full, and the depth of
the water quickly rose to about seven or eight feet, overwhelming the
unfortunate man, who quickly drowned. The first person to dive into the water
after him almost drowned as well, and it was at least three hours before his
fellow slaves recovered James's body.
In 1798 thirty slaves at Mount Vernon, presumably adults, divided into
two groups and played a team sport that Niemcewicz, the Polish visitor,
described as "prisoner's base," which involved "jumps and
gambols as if they had rested all week." Prisoner's base was a traditional
English game, dating back to the Middle Ages, which is depicted in contemporary
prints and was the subject of at least one song. In the eighteenth century,
both children and adults of all classes played it outdoors. It appears to have
been a highly athletic, team version of the modern game known as Tag.
George Washington occasionally gave his slaves leave to attend special
sporting events. In the fall of 1786, for example, he permitted them to go into
Alexandria to attend the horse races, stipulating that so long as responsible
individuals remained on each of his farms, the others were free to stagger
their attendance over the several-day event. Washington was not the only
plantation owner to allow such privileges; slaves belonging to his longtime
friend, Dr. David Stuart, went to the races in Alexandria in October 1784. The
slaves who accompanied the Washingtons to Philadelphia during the presidency
received several opportunities to enjoy the entertainments available in the
city. In May 1791, Martha Washington gave Christopher Sheets and Hercules each
a ticket to a play. Two years later, Mrs. Washington gave her maids, Oney Judge
and Molly, a dollar "to see the tumbling feats," and two months later
she funded the women's visit to the circus. They must have liked what they saw
there, because less than a month later Hercules and another man, Austin, also
received money for the same purpose.
The Washingtons occasionally included the slaves at Mount Vernon in
family celebrations as participants, rather than as servants. One of the most
memorable of such events was the marriage on 22 February 1799 (George's
sixty-seventh and last birthday) of Martha Washington's youngest granddaughter,
Eleanor Parke "Nelly" Custis, to George Washington's nephew, Lawrence
Lewis. In addition to various members of the extended family, a sizable number
of slaves also attended. Martha Washington wore a "light flowered
satin" dress and "let all the servants come in to see" the
wedding, according to a woman known as Mammy. She described the event nearly
sixty years later to the bride's niece, Agnes Lee (who called Mammy "the
last but two of the Mt. Vernon servants"). The slaves were more than just
spectators, however. Mrs. Washington, or "ole Mistis" as Mammy called
her, also provided them with "such good things to eat," probably the
special delicacies prepared for the wedding. While it is doubtful that the
Washingtons would have or even could have invited all of the slaves from the
outlying farms, it is conceivable that they would have included in the
festivities the approximately ninety slaves on the Mansion House Farm, with
whom the Washingtons were not only physically but likely emotionally close.
Less than a year after Nelly's wedding, the death of George Washington
had a tremendous effect on the personal lives of virtually every slave at Mount
Vernon. He died on 14 December 1799 after a short illness and on 18 December
was buried in the family vault following Episcopalian and Masonic funeral
rites. Frank Lee, the family's mulatto butler (and brother of William Lee), and
two of the other serving men from the mansion, Christopher Sheets and Marcus,
were outfitted with new shoes the day after Washington's death, probably to
look extra-special while waiting on guests attending the funeral. Two other
slaves, Wilson Hardiman and Cyrus, took part in the ceremonies, leading Washington's
horse, which carried his saddle, holster, and pistols, in the funeral
procession from the mansion to the tomb. After the interment, the family
offered something to eat and drink to the large number of unrelated visitors
who had taken part in the funeral. Afterward, the family distributed to the
slaves "remains of the provisions," according to Tobias Lear,
Washington's friend and secretary.
The lives of the enslaved African Americans who
lived and worked at Mount Vernon in the late eighteenth century were fairly
typical of the lives of slaves on large plantations throughout Virginia.
However, they probably had more freedom over certain aspects of their lives
than the average modern visitor to George Washington's home might suspect. In
their time off from their rigorous schedule of work in the house and on the
farms, the Mount Vernon slaves engaged in tasks that earned small sums of money
in order to better their lives. However, George Washington, as the owner of the
African American men, women, and children at Mount Vernon and on the outlying
farms, could at any time change his mind about allowing a certain liberty.
Source 14
Slavery In Early America's Colonies:
Seeds of Servitude Rooted in The Civil Law of Rome
by
Charles P.M. Outwin (1996)
The
question of definable humanity in the slave continued to plagued the courts.
Though his Negroes were impersonally "salable," an owner was not
allowed arbitrarily to kill one "as he could an ox." Indeed, in 1706
it was determined that "the common law takes no notice of negroes (sic)
for being different from other men. By common law no man can have property in
another, except in special instances ....” The opinion handed down by Sir
Philip Yorke, Attorney-General of the realm at the end of 1729, stated that
a slave, by coming from the West Indies, either with or
without his master, to Great Britain or Ireland, doth not become free; and that
his master's property or right in him is not thereby determined or varied; and
baptism doth not bestow freedom on him, nor make any alteration in his temporal
condition in these kingdoms.This was an unfortunate decision, because by then
American and British legal practice had already begun to diverge along the
lines of economic expediency, supported by resort to Roman civil code. American
courts in the South were to look more and more to Roman law concerning
propertied interest for antecedents. The common law, then, had become victim of
its own flexibility.
Source 15
|
Charles City County, VA Slave
Schedule - 1860 Census
|
||
|
(Number next to name is number of
slaves owned - names are listed in order of appearance in census)
|
||
|
Valentine
Walker, 7
William
H. Hearwood, 7
John
L. Parsons, 3
Anthony
H. Lamb, 15
Junius
Lamb, 3
Jacob
Vaiden, 9
Ann
E. Vaiden, 9
Thomas
H. Wilcox, 1
Thomas
J. Mocock, 2
William
J. Billifont, 4
Adolphus
Goddin, 4
Wyatt
B. Walker, 8
Edward
T. Haynes, 3
William
H. A. Southall, 17
James
E. Holdcraft, 3
William
F. Walker, 17
Beverly
F. Harwood, 3
John
M. Harwood, 3
George
W. Vaiden, 7
Susan
A. Martin, 1
Pleasant
D. Ellett, 3
Edward
H. Marable, 7
Ann
E. Lamb, 14
William
S. Graves, 12
Joseph
T. Brown, 4
Albert
G. Brown, 9
Letitia
A. Brown, 4
Robert
J. Vaiden, 25
Susan
Gregory, 8
Sarah
E. Townley, 4
James
H. Lipscomb, 3
B.
E. Graves, 5
Morris
F. Vaiden, 7
James
H. Christian, 29
James
H. Pierce (in trust), 13
Jerome
M. Vaiden, 2
Elizabeth
T. Vaiden, 11
Edmund
A Sanders, 1
Marieva
Sanders, 1
Marietta
Sanders, 1
Essy
Walker, 4
Robert
W. Graves, 4
William
F. Graves, 3
Thomas
S. Christian, 2
Thomas
Bowry, 14
Richard
M. Graves, 16
John
S. Vaiden, 7
Susan
Barrow, 2
Henry
B. Hopkins, 22
Henry
P. Barrow, 12
Mildred
Lacy, 2
Alfred
Finch, 5
John
Smith, 22
Sarah
E. Coleman, 18
Thomas
P. Harrison, 10
C.
A. M. Harrison, 13
Nanny
B. Harrison, 12
Josiah
C. Wilson, 60
Charles
J. Major, 2
Mary
M. Major, 1
Joseph
L. New, 6
B.
P. Binns, 15
Ann
K. C. Otey, 15
Bettie
J. Lipscomb, 1
John
M. Lamb, 18
Henry
M. Clay, 2
James
Hubbard, 4
Frances
A. Ware, 3
Samuel
Waddell, 17
Joyce
Binns, 1
William
Jordon, 89
Mary
A. C. Walker, 23
Sam
Brown, 1
L.
W. Vaiden, 11
A.
M. Ferguson, 28
E.
A. Adams, 2
John
M. Ferguson, 1
William
H. Clopaton (?), 25
John
Tyler, 44
George
Major, 27
Elizabeth
Marable, 1
Anderson
Wade, 10
Thomas
H. Wilcox, 31
Thomas
W. Wilcox, 15
F.
L. Douthat, 29
Robert
Douthat, 47
Eleanor
Douthat, 11
P.
F. Gary, 15
William
H. Seldon, 44
E.
M. Gordon, 5
Tabitha
Christian, 14
Edmund
Waddell, 3
Richard
Christian, 9
George
Walker, 10
William
H. Taylor, 15
Wm.
H. Taylor, 2
Isaac
H. Christian, 3
Selden
C. Slater, 1
Franklin
Gary, 6
|
Vernon
J. M. Castle, 1
Thomas
Christian, 39
Philip
Haxall, 7
Goerge
G. Bowry, 2
Lucy
Kezee, 6
Thomas
Stagg, 6
Mary
A. Mumford, 3
Thomas
W. Bradley, 41
Robert
T. Epps, 10
B.
A. Nance, 16
L.
A. Marston, 7
Martha
Butler, 13
William
A. Marston, 9
Thomas
H. Marston, 14
Susan
A. Epps, 6
Robert
Maddox, 2
Edwin
L. Ware, 9
Christopher
Maddox, 10
John
H. Bowry, 11
Marion
Gary, 1
Mary
A. Gary, 7
William
Otey, 5
R
S. C. Robbins, 2
James
Lawrence, 8
Nat
Lawrence, 8
William
A. Pearman, 6
Mary
A. Bradly, 1
William
Pemberton, 11
Rubin
Moss, 3
William
M. Warinner, 6
William
Warinner, 3
Philip
C. Buffet, 2
John
M. Barlow, 1
John
Rock 3
Priscilla
Fauqua, 2
James
B. Wayanack, 5
William
Waddell, 1
John
L. Walker, 10
Lucy
Barnes, 7
A.
Barnes, 1
James
Nance, 2
Patric
Pearman, 10
James
A. Ladd, 8
Sam
Hampton, 1
Isiah
Bradly, 1
Allen
Bradly, 23
Robert
Bradly, 2
Patsy
& Rebecca Pierce, 1
Ed
James ward R. Phillips, 17
Joseph
Gentry, 5
Daniel
J. Adams, 7
Alexander
A. Bugleston, 43
(agent
for Edmund Ruffin)
William
E. Christian, 17
Conellum
C.Folkes, 8
R.
W. Christian, 7
Phillip
Christian, 4
Mary
Christian, 1
Elizabeth
Christian, 5
William
H. Hayes, 5
Richard
Hayes, 5
Rebecca
Hayes, 2
John
A. Clark, 2
Archer
Taylor, 20
Augustus
T. Crenshaw, 22
Gideon
Christian, 1
Martha
A. Taylor, 9
William
E. Gill, 14
Matthew
Gentry, 5
Benn
Ladd, 1
William
H. Pearman, 1
Feeling
W. Binnsaft, 1
G.
A. Crenshaw, 11
John
D. Clark, 10
William
H. T. clark, 1
David
Haxall, 36
William
H. Alexander, 2
John
P. Royal, 36
Hill
Carter, 142
W.
L. Crawford, 42
(agent
for Rich Epps)
William
L, Shaw, 29
(agent
for William M.Harrison)
William
Taylor, 2
Del
Clark, 1
Miles
K. Crenshaw, 13
H.
P. Barrow, 1
Richard
Folkes, 1
James
E. Roane, 31
Powhatan
B. Stark, 10
P.B.
Stark, 19
Mary
M. Orgain, 9
Mary
Minge, 6
William
A. Harrison, 45
William
White, 3
(agent
for William Bishop)
Edward
Major, 2
George
E. Waddell, 16
John
A. Selden, 25
Edward
Wilcox, 75
William
J. Upshaw, 29
Martha
A. Taylor, 9
William
E. Gill, 14
Matthew
Gentry, 5
Benn
Ladd, 1
William
H. Pearman, 1
Feeling
W. Binnsaft, 1
G.
A. Crenshaw, 11
John
D. Clark, 10
|
John
J. Clark, 16
John
R. Armistead, 45
John
Selden, 53
James
M. Wilcox, 82
Edward
L. Young, 24
M.
P. Barker, 9
employeed.
by J. Parker, 6
(owners,
William Marable, C. Harrison, E. B.
Anderson,
Mary Mumford, Elizabeth Warren)
Theodrick
Lipscomb, 182
(agent
for Richard Baylor)
Ben
Harrison, 32
employeed.
by Ben Harrison, 3
(H.
D. Gordon, owner)
Archer
Harrison, 6
John
T. Holt, 9
William
R. Stagg, 14
Gideon
Christian, 13 (Mary Christian,
owned
4, B. L. Christian owned 7)
Thomas
F. Pollard, 9
employeed.
by Thomas F. Pollard, 4
(Alfred
Finch, owned 2, B. L. Christian
owned
1, L. Royston owned 1)
William
A. Winston, 3
James
H. Crump, 3
Sam
Hampton, 1
Isiah
Bradly, 1
Allen
Bradly, 23
Robert
Bradly, 2
Patsy
& Rebecca Pierce, 1
Ed
James ward R. Phillips, 17
Joseph
Gentry, 5
Daniel
J. Adams, 7
Alexander
A. Bugleston, 43
(agent
for Edmund Ruffin)
William
E. Christian, 17
Conellum
C.Folkes, 8
R.
W. Christian, 7
Phillip
Christian, 4
Mary
Christian, 1
Elizabeth
Christian, 5
William
H. Hayes, 5
Richard
Hayes, 5
Rebecca
Hayes, 2
John
A. Clark, 2
Archer
Taylor, 20
Augustus
T. Crenshaw, 22
Gideon
Christian, 1
David
Haxall, 36
William
H. Alexander, 2
John
P. Royal, 36
Hill
Carter, 142
W.
L. Crawford, 42
|
--Taken from VA census data, 1860
Source
16:
SOME
SLAVERY STATISTICS:
Slaves
as a percentage of Virginia's total population in 1680: 7
Slaves
as a percentage of Virginia's total population in 1720: 30
Slaves
as a percentage of Virginia's total population in 1770: 42
Number
of slaves in Virginia in 1750: 100,000
Number of slaves in Virginia in 1850: 200,000
--Taken from VA census data, 1860
Source 17
Charleston
Mercury, Oct. 11, 1860
The
Terrors of Submission
A
few days since, we endeavored to show, that the pictures of ruin and desolation
to the South, which the submissionists to Black Republican domination were so
continually drawing, to "fright us from our propriety," were unreal
and false. We propose now to reverse the picture, and to show what will
probably be the consequences of a submission of the Southern States, to the
rule of Abolitionism at Washington, in the persons of Messrs. LINCOLN and
HAMLIN, should they be elected to the Presidency and Vice-Presidency of the
United States.
1.
The first effect of the submission of the South, to the installation of
Abolitionists in the offices of President and Vice-President of the United
States, must be a powerful consolidation of the strength of the Abolition party
at the North. Success, generally strengthens. If, after all the threats of
resistance and disunion, made in Congress and out of Congress, the Southern
States sink down into acquiescence, the demoralization of the South will be
complete. Add the patronage resulting from the control of ninety-four thousand
offices, and the expenditure of eighty millions of money annually, and they
must be irresistable in controlling the General Government.
2.
To plunder the South for the benefit of the North, by a new Protective Tariff,
will be one of their first measures of Northern sectional domination; and, on
the other hand, to exhaust the treasury by sectional schemes of appropriation,
will be a congenial policy.
3.
Immediate danger will be brought to slavery, in all the Frontier States. When a
party is enthroned at Washington, in the Executive and Legislative departments
of the Government, whose creed it is, to repeal the Fugitive Slave Laws, the
underground railroad, will become an over-ground railroad. The tenure of slave
property will be felt to be weakened; and the slaves will be sent down to the
Cotton States for sale, and the Frontier States enter on the policy of making
themselves Free States.
4.
With the control of the Government of the United States, and an organized and
triumphant North to sustain them, the Abolitionists will renew their operations
upon the South with increased courage. The thousands in every country who look
up to power, and make gain out of the future, will come out in support of the
Abolition Government. The BROWNLOWS and the BOTTS', in the South, will
multiply. They will organize; and from being a Union party, to support an
Abolition Government, they will become, like the Government they support,
Abolitionists. They will have an Abolition Party in the South, of Southern men.
The contest for slavery, will no longer be one between the North and the South.
It will be in the South, between the people of the South.
5.
If, in our present position of power and unitedness, we have the raid of JOHN
BROWN -- and twenty towns burned down in Texas in one year, by Abolitionists --
what will be the measures of insurrection and incendiarism, which must follow
our notorious and abject prostration to Abolition rule at Washington, with all
the patronage of the Federal Government, and a Union organization in the South
to support it? Secret conspiracy, and its attendant horrors, with rumors of
horrors, will hover over every portion of the South; while, in the language of
the Black Republican patriarch -- GIDDINGS -- they "will laugh at your
calamities, and mock when your fear cometh."
6.
Already there is uneasiness throughout the South, as to the stability of its
institution of slavery. But with a submission to the rule of Abolitionists at
Washington, thousands of slaveholders will despair of the institution. While
the condition of things in the Frontier States will force their slaves on the
markets of the Cotton States, the timid in the Cotton States, will also sell
their slaves. The consequence must be, slave property must be greatly
depreciated. We see advertisements for the sale of slaves in some of the Cotton
States, for the simple object of getting rid of them; and we know that standing
orders for the purchase of slaves in this market have been withdrawn, on
account of an anticipated decline of value from the political condition of the
country.
7.
We suppose, that taking in view all these things, it is not extravagant to
estimate, that the submission of the South to the administration of the Federal
Government under Messrs. LINCOLN and HAMLIN, must reduce the value of slaves in
the South, one hundred dollars each. It is computed that there are four
million, three hundred thousand, slaves in the United States. Here, therefore,
is a loss to the Southern people of four hundred and thirty millions of dollars,
on their slaves alone. Of course, real estate of all kinds must partake also in
the depreciation of slaves.
8.
Slave property, is the foundation of all property in the South. When security
in this is shaken, all other property partakes of its instability. Banks,
stocks, bonds, must be influenced. Timid men will sell out and leave the South.
Confusion, distrust and pressure must reign.
9.
Before Messrs. LINCOLN and HAMLIN can be installed in Washington, as President
and Vice-President of the United States, the Southern States can dissolve
peaceably (we know what we say) their union with the North. Mr. LINCOLN and his
Abolition cohorts, will have no South, to reign over. Their game would be
blocked. The foundation of their organization, would be taken away; and, left
to the tender mercies of a baffled, furious and troubled North, they would be
cursed and crushed, as the flagitious cause of the disasters around them. But
if we submit, and do not dissolve our union with the North, we make the triumph
of our Abolition enemies complete, and enable them to consolidate and wield the
power of the North, for our destruction.
10.
If the South once submits to the rule of Abolitionists by the General
Government, there is, probably, an end of all peaceful separation of the Union.
We can only escape the ruin they meditate for the South, by war. Armed with
power of the General Government, and their organizations at the North, they
will have no respect for our courage or energy, and they will use the sword for
our subjection. If there is any man in the South who believes, that we must
separate from the North, we appeal to his humanity, in case Mr. LINCOLN is
elected, to dissolve our connection with the North, before the 4th of March
next.
11.
The ruin of the South, by the emancipation of her slaves, is not like the ruin
of any other people. It is not a mere loss of liberty, like the Italians under
the BOURBONS. It is not heavy taxation, which must still leave the means of
living, or otherwise taxation defeats itself. But it is the loss of liberty,
property, home, country -- everything that makes life worth living. And this
loss, will probably take place under circumstances of suffering and horror,
unsurpassed in the history of nations. We must preserve our liberties and
institutions, under penalties greater than those which impend over any people
in the world.
12. Lastly, we conclude this brief statement of the terrors
of submission, by declaring, that in our opinion, they are ten-fold greater
even than the supposed terrors of disunion.
Source 18
Letter
of S.F. Hale, Commissioner of Alabama, to Gov. Beriah Magoffin of Kentucky
Sent
in December of 1860
Who can look upon such a picture without a shudder? What
Southern man, be he slave-holder or non-slave-holder, can without indignation
and horror contemplate the triumph of negro equality, and see his own sons and
daughters, in the not distant future, associating with free negroes upon terms
of political and social equality, and the white man stripped, by the
Heaven-daring hand of fanaticism of that title to superiority over the black
race which God himself has bestowed? In the Northern States, where free negroes
are so few as to form no appreciable part of the community, in spite of all the
legislation for their protection, they still remain a degraded caste, excluded
by the ban of society from social association with all but the lowest and most
degraded of the white race. But in the South, where in many places the African
race largely predominates, and, as a consequence, the two races would be
continually pressing together, amalgamation, or the extermination of the one or
the other, would be inevitable. Can Southern men submit to such degradation and
ruin? God forbid that they should.
Source 19
Which Slave Wrote His Way Out of Slavery?
By: Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Posted: November 26, 2012 at 12:02 AM
From the time when they first landed in Florida
in the early 1500s, African Americans did their best to run away from the
inhumane conditions of slavery. Over the course of slavery in the United States
between 1513 and 1865, tens of thousands of people managed to escape, first south
from the Carolinas and Georgia to the haven afforded by Spanish Florida before
1763, and later, north from the Southern colonies and states across the
Mason-Dixon Line. More than a hundred of these "fugitive slaves," as
they were called, even wrote or dictated books about their deliverance from
bondage, detailing how they were able to escape. While each escape was
something of a miracle, some of the methods that they used are astonishing.
Everyone has their favorite slave narratives,
as the genre of books is called. My own short list includes the stories of
Henry Brown, William and Ellen Craft and Frederick Douglass. In 1838 Frederick
Douglass donned a sailor's uniform, sewn by his soon-to-be wife, who was free,
and rode a train from Baltimore to Philadelphia disguised as a free man using
papers he had obtained from a free black seaman. In 1848 Ellen Craft, who had a
very light complexion, did a double cross-dress as white man and, accompanied
by her dark-complexioned husband, rode to freedom on a train ride from Macon,
Ga., to Philadelphia, masked as master and slave. A year later Henry
"Box" Brown actually had himself nailed into a wooden,
claustrophobic, coffin-like box, and then shipped from slavery in Richmond to
freedom in Philadelphia.
But the oddest way that a slave escaped from
slavery, to me, without a doubt, is the story of Ayuba.
Ayuba wrote his way out of slavery. As
incredible as this may seem, this is literally true. The man who came to be
known in England as "Job ben Solomon" was born Ayuba Suleiman Jallo
(or, in French, "Diallo") into a prominent family in Bundu, an
independent, precolonial country located in current-day Senegal. Bundu was
situated where the Falémé River meets the Senegal River, and it was a strictly
Muslim country.
Ayuba was a member of the Fulbe ethnic group.
As his biographer Allen Austin tells us, Ayuba was a highly learned man, adept
at both Koranic and Arabic studies. And, as the historian John Thornton
explained to me, "he was a religious cleric who, like so many other
Africans at the time, sold people as slaves, along with [selling] other things,
as a way of participating in the international economy of his day, as an
incidental element of his life."
Some time in February 1730, he left his home on
a two-week journey to purchase paper and other goods in exchange for two
slaves. Mandingo slave traders captured and sold him to an English captain whom
he had angered over the terms of sale of those two slaves. Ayuba survived the
Middle Passage on board the slave ship Arabella (voyage 75094 in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Database) and ended up
enslaved on a tobacco plantation on Kent Island, near Annapolis, Md.
Now renamed Simon by his master, Ayuba managed
to run away, only to be recaptured and imprisoned. As luck would have it, he
was visited by a lawyer named Thomas Bluett, who became fascinated by stories
of this man's insistence on praying, refusing to eat pork or consume alcohol
and most of all, by the habit of an African man writing on the wall of his
prison cell in some unknown language.
And then the strangest thing happened: Ayuba
sat down one day, and -- hope against hope -- wrote a letter addressed to his
father, back in Senegal. The letter was written entirely in Arabic. I
have no idea what possessed this brother to do such a crazy thing, something
completely impossible to achieve. After all, there wasn't exactly a postal
service delivering letters from slaves back home to their relatives in the
motherland, was there? But this is what this man did. And, incredibly, it
worked!
Ayuba gave the letter, which implored his
father to come to America and rescue him from slavery, to his master, Alexander
Tolsey, who in turn gave it to Vachel Denton, who sent it by boat to Henry
Hunt, an English merchant in London for whom Denton was a factor or agent. Hunt
worked with a Captain Pyke, the man who had sold Ayuba into slavery in the
first place. (It was a very small world!) Pyke in turn showed the letter to
General James Oglethorpe, the founder of the colony of Georgia. Oglethorpe
contacted his friend in the Royal African Company, Sir Bibye Lake, who had the
bright idea of sending it to John Gagnier, a professor who held the Laudian
Chair of Arabic at the University of Oxford, asking him to translate it. And
what the letter revealed astonished them.
Amazed that an African was literate and
well-educated, obviously so very intelligent and of noble lineage, Oglethorpe
got the Royal African Company (which possessed a monopoly on the slave trade)
to purchase Ayuba and ship him from Annapolis to London! Ayuba sailed for
London with Thomas Bluett in March 1733. In London, the exotic Ayuba, dressed
in his native garb, as we can see in his portrait by William Hoare, was the
toast of the town. Called Job ben Solomon, he was befriended by a host of
English notables, including the physician to the king, Sir Hans Sloane, the
antiquarian Joseph Ames and the Duke of Montagu, who become one of his patrons,
among many others. Ayuba had an audience with King George II and Queen
Caroline, and was even made an honorary member of the Spalding Gentlemen's
Society, in which Isaac Newton and Alexander Pope were members.
These friends raised the funds to purchase his
freedom from the Royal African Company, giving him the freedom to return home.
At his request, Bluett wrote and published a memoir in 1734 detailing the
strange circumstances of Ayuba's enslavement and freedom, including an
explanation of the Anglicization of his name from the original Arabic
"Hyuba, boon Salumena, boon Hibrahema," to Job, the Son of Solomon
(ben Solomon), the Son of Abraham, the name Bluett used in his book.
As the African-American food historian Michael
Twitty told me, with only a hint of exaggeration and a dash of anachronism,
"Job ben Solomon was essentially the first slave to FedEx himself back to
Africa." (One is tempted to quote that sage philosopher of the people, Don
King: "Only in America," but Thornton points out that a few examples
of this can also be found in the history of slavery in Brazil.)
And in a final twist in a most ironic life, Ayuba
did indeed return to Senegal, arriving on Aug. 8, 1734, the year in which his
book was published, on board the Dolphin Snow, but now as an employee of the
Royal African Company. He assisted the company in its bid to compete with the
French commercial presence in Senegambia, including, presumably, the slave
trade. One of the first things he did after he had landed was to trade some of
the gifts his English patrons had given him to purchase two horses and,
incredibly, a female slave.
Ayuba died in Gambia in 1773, the same year
that the Boston slave Phillis Wheatley, who wrote fondly of "Pleasing
Gambia" as her own native land, would become the first person of African
descent to publish a volume of poetry in English.
Like her metaphorical
countryman, Wheatley would be freed by her master because of the power of her
literary skills, some 40 years after Ayuba became the first African-American
slave to write his way out of slavery.
Source 20
Which Slave Mailed Himself to Freedom? Really!
By: Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Posted: May 6, 2013 at 12:36 AM
From
the Collection of the New-York Historical Society
What is one of the most novel ways a slave
devised to escape bondage?
Here you see a man by the name of Henry Brown,
Ran
away from the South to the North,
Which he would not have done but they stole
all his rights,
But they'll never do like again.
Chorus: Brown laid down
the shovel and the hoe,
Down in the box he did go; No more slave work for Henry
Box Brown,
In the box by Express he did go.
--"Song Composed by Henry
Box Brown on His Escape From Slavery," Narrative of the Life of Henry Box
Brown, Written by Himself
Job ben Solomon, as we saw in an earlier column, was the first and
probably the only slave who literally wrote his way out of American slavery. He
penned a letter in Arabic to his father, from his jail cell in Maryland, which
led quite circuitously to its translation at Oxford, England, and then to his
purchase, release and repatriation to Senegambia in 1734 -- only after a stop
in London where he was feted by British royalty and the intellectual elite, had
his portrait painted and a book about his remarkable escapades published.
But another slave plotted his own escape from
bondage in even more astonishing and harrowing way, and his name was Henry
Brown.
If Job ben Solomon expressed his desperate
quest for freedom in a letter, Henry Brown expressed his own desperate desire
to be free in an even more novel form: He actually mailed his own body
from slavery to freedom, from Richmond to Philadelphia, from the slave state of
Virginia to the free state of Pennsylvania, a distance of 250 miles.
Brown was the ultimate "escape
artist," as Daphne Brooks brilliantly labels him in her book Bodies in Dissent. He was a precursor,
she argues, to Houdini. And as we shall see, he not only performed his amazing
-- and quite dangerous -- escape once, but reprised part of the journey during
a lecture tour in England. But I get ahead of my story.
Henry Brown was born into slavery on a
plantation called "The Hermitage" in Louisa County, Va., around 1815,
fairly close to Charlottesville, where Thomas Jefferson was still living at
Monticello. Upon his master's death, when Brown was 15, he was sent to work for
his late owner's son, William, in his tobacco factory in Richmond. In about
1836, he married another slave (curiously, with their owners' consent), a woman
named Nancy, who was owned by a bank clerk. Brown was able to rent a house for
his family. Together, they had three children.
Over time, Nancy was sold twice. Her third
owner, Samuel Cottrell, actually charged Brown $50 a year to keep Nancy from
being sold. But in August 1848, Cottrell sold Nancy anyway, along with their
three children, to a Methodist minister in North Carolina. Brown raced to the
jail where his family was being held, but it was too late. As they were
shuffled through the streets of Richmond, Brown held Nancy's hand for four
miles. Nancy and the three children were marched on foot along with 350 other
slaves, in the horrendous second Middle Passage, all the way to North
Carolina. Nancy was pregnant with their fourth child. The two would never see
each other again.
Brown tells us in his slave narrative that he begged his own
master to purchase his family but his master refused: "I went to my Christian
master … but he shoved me away."
Devastated and overcome with the most acute
sense of his own sheer powerlessness, Brown sought solace and guidance through
prayer. "An idea," he reported, "suddenly flashed across my
mind." And what an idea it was! Perhaps only God -- or an official at the
expanding express delivery service in America -- could have fashioned such a
bizarre plan: "Brown's revelation," Paul Finkelman and Richard Newman
write in their entry on him in The African American National Biography,
"was that he have himself nailed into a wooden box and 'conveyed as dry
goods' via the Adams Express Company from slavery in Richmond to freedom in
Philadelphia."
How was he to realize such a bold, and wild,
idea? How would he avoid suffocation in this coffin-like encasement? What about
claustrophobia? How long could a human being live in a box without dehydration?
Not to mention deal with his body functions? As Brown's biographer, Jeffrey
Ruggles, explains in The Unboxing of Henry Brown, Adams
Express advertised the one-day trip from Richmond to Philadelphia, a distance
of 250 miles -- but only if the package encountered no glitches, no delays. If
so, the trip could take much longer. Could a human being survive such a trip?
Or would his crate turn into his casket?
How He Did It
Though only 5 feet, 8 inches tall, Brown at the
time weighed 200 pounds, so this was not going to be an easy thing to
accomplish, and impossible, of course, without a lot of assistance. Two
friends, both named Smith, decided to help Henry with this crazy scheme: James
Caesar Anthony Smith, a free black man who sang with Brown in the choir of
First African Baptist Church, introduced Brown to Samuel Alexander Smith, a
white shoemaker and gambler. Brown paid Samuel Smith $86 to help him.
Through James Smith's intervention, a black
carpenter named John Mattaner built the wooden box -- "complete with baize
lining, air holes, a container of water and hickory straps" -- to fit
Brown's rotund frame. Samuel Smith corresponded with James Miller McKim, the
Philadelphia abolitionist (and the father of future famed architect, Charles
McKim) for guidance. McKim asked Smith to address the package to James Johnson,
131 Arch Street.
As Henry Brown scholar Hollis Robbins writes in
a 2009 American Studies article, "Smith's
correspondence with McKim about the timing of the trip, particularly his
attention to the breakup of the ice on the Susquehanna [River], indicates his
-- and perhaps Brown's -- practical understanding of the conditions necessary
for the box to arrive swiftly enough for Brown to survive the journey."
The entire box measured only 3 feet 1 inch long, 2 feet wide and 2 feet 6
inches high. Brown burned his hand with sulphuric acid (oil of vitriol) so he
could justify taking the day off without raising suspicion. He took along a few
biscuits, or crackers, and a small bladder of water to sustain him.
With "This Side Up With Care" painted
on the container, at 4:00 a.m. on March 23, 1849, Brown's friends loaded his
boxed self onto a wagon, and delivered it to the depot. In his slave narrative,
Brown describes his harrowing journey, including the sickening effect of
traveling much of the journey upside-down, head-first, in spite of the label on
the box. One wrong move, one unguarded sound or smell, would lead to his
detection, capture, imprisonment and return to slavery, and perhaps to the Deep
South.
Brown nearly died on
the 27-hour trip: At one point, he was turned upside-down for several hours.
His sole relief came when two passengers, wanting to talk, tipped the box flat
to sit on it. The box was flipped again when it was boarded on a train in
Washington, D.C. Brown had no choice but to remain silent and not move, no
matter how the box was positioned.
Some 24 hours later, as Robbins describes,
traveling by wagon to the depot, hefted by express workers from wagon to
railcar, to steamboat, to another wagon, to another railcar, to a ferry and the
once again by railcar, Brown finally arrived at the depot in Philadelphia.
Three hours later, Brown's box was taken by wagon to the Anti-Slavery
Committee's offices on North Fifth Street in Philadelphia. No one could know if
their cargo was alive or dead. The four waiting abolitionists, including McKim,
tapped on the lip of the crate four times, the signal that all was clear.
Finkelman and Newman describe what happened
next: "A small, nervous group, including William Still, the
African-American conductor of Philadelphia's Underground Railroad, pried open
the lid to reveal … the disheveled and battered Henry Brown, who arose and
promptly fainted," but not before exclaiming, "How do you do, gentlemen!"
Revived with a glass of water, Brown sang Psalm 40: "Be pleased, O Lord,
to deliver me!" McKim noted that the trip "nearly killed him,"
and that "Nothing saved him from suffocation but the free use of water …
with which he bathed his face, and the constant fanning of himself" with
his hat. He managed to breathe through the three small holes that he bore in
the box with a gimlet. Brown called his trip "my resurrection from the
grave of slavery."
Henceforth, the word "Box" would
become Henry's self-chosen legal middle name, with no quotation marks around
it. His friend, James Smith, however, did gain a nickname from the adventure:
He became known as James "Boxer" Smith.
How His Fame Grew
Henry Box Brown had done what no slave anywhere
had ever done before: He had mailed himself to freedom. Overnight, Brown became
quite the celebrity on the abolitionist lecture circuit, much to Frederick
Douglass' annoyance. He and his friend James Smith became a standard feature at
abolitionist rallies, reciting the incredible saga of his escape, singing songs
he wrote, as well as his psalm of deliverance, and selling his book, which was
published just a few months after his escape. Woodcuts of his head popping out
of the wooden crate were widely circulated. Even a children's book contained a
chapter about his incredible escape.
Brown was not only an effective speaker; you
might say that he was also the entrepreneur of entrepreneurs on the
fugitive-slave circuit. In an email, his biographer Jeffrey Ruggles said that
"Brown's imagination and creativity were akin to his entrepreneurial
contemporary," P.T. Barnum, though on a much smaller scale, of course.
With a loan of $150 from the wealthy white abolitionist, Gerritt Smith, and in
collaboration with the artist Josiah Wolcott, Brown created a "large,
didactic panorama, 'The Mirror of Slavery,' which consisted of thousands
of feet of canvas, divided into scores of panels painted with scenes depicting
the history of slavery."
Brown debuted his routine in Boston, along with
James Smith. The panorama was a hit: As Christine Crater reports, "The Boston Daily Evening
Traveller hailed it as 'one of the finest panoramas now on exhibition … Many
people would walk a long way to see this curious specimen of American freedom …
We wish all the slaveholders would go and view their system on canvas.' "
Accompanied onstage
by Benjamin F. Roberts, a black abolitionist, who would lecture on "The Condition
of the Colored People in the United States," Brown toured the North
testifying about the evils of slavery and repeating the details of his
imaginative mode of escape. Brown -- a great storyteller with a gifted voice
for song -- was for a short time the darling of the abolitionist circuit.
Douglass' irritation with Brown stemmed not so
much from a sense of rivalry (since Douglass had dominated the fugitive-slave
category on the abolition lecture circuit since 1845) as it did from Douglass'
worry that disclosure of Brown's novel method of escape might keep other slaves
from employing a similar strategy, alerting authorities to the possibility that
crates could contain a fleeing slave.
But as Ruggles explains, revelation of Brown's
method of escape wasn't really his fault: "Douglass wasn't entirely
correct in blaming the Garrisonians [abolitionists] for revealing the box
method. They had tried to keep quiet about Brown's escape, but word leaked out
in a Vermont newspaper and soon an article appeared in the New York Tribune.
That article alerted the Adams Express Company and a second box escape from
Richmond, attempted by both Smiths in May, 1849, was intercepted. It was only
after articles about that failure had appeared in many newspapers that the
Boston abolitionists went public about Brown's escape at the New England
Anti-Slavery Convention in late May 1849."
Regardless of how it happened, Douglass proved
to be right about the effects of disclosure: Upon discovery of the rescue
attempt of a second slave on May 8, 1849, Samuel Smith, the white shopkeeper
who had helped Brown, was arrested, and served six and a half years in the
Virginia state penitentiary for doing so. A few months later, on Sept. 25,
James Smith would also be arrested for an attempt to help still another slave
to escape in the same way, though he would be acquitted in a trial, after which
he joined Brown in Boston. (Another slave, a woman named Rose Jackson, was
willingly smuggled by her owners from Oklahoma in a box over the Oregon Trail
in the same year that Brown escaped, but she was allowed to emerge each night.)
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 put an end, for
a time, to Brown's celebrity, at least on this side of the Atlantic. After
being assaulted twice on the streets of Providence, R.I., Brown -- like many
other prominent fugitive slaves -- fled to England in October 1850, to avoid
arrest by a slave-catcher.
There, he published a second edition of his
slave narrative in Manchester in 1851, this one "written by himself."
(The first edition had been dictated to, and heavily edited by, a white
abolitionist named Charles Stearns. John
Ernest's edition, published in 2009, is the authoritative text.)
Ever the showman, Brown soon became a most colorful feature on the British
lecture circuit, traveling with his moving panorama from Liverpool to
Manchester. He even re-enacted his escape, at least partially.
Jeffrey Ruggles writes that "Ads for Henry
Box Brown stated that he would get into the original box as a part of his
exhibition, but the only instance known of him actually being conveyed in his
box was from Bradford to Leeds in May 1851." The Leeds Mercury reported
that on May 22, 1851, as Ruggles discovered, " 'He was packed up in the
box at Bradford' and 'forwarded to Leeds' on the 6 P.M. train. 'On arriving at
the Wellington station, the box was placed in a coach and, preceded by a band
of music and banners, representing the stars and stripes of America, paraded
through the principal streets of the town.' "
Ruggles explained that this didn't amount to a
replication of Brown's original trip, however: "The distance was much less
than Richmond to Philadelphia. For this event, Brown was in the box for
two-and-three-quarter hours, and James Smith accompanied him outside the box
the whole way, so it was neither as long nor as harrowing as his journey to
escape. The box was taken to a theater where Brown emerged onstage."
How He Changed With the Times
Brown was a complicated figure. There is some
evidence that he could have purchased the freedom of his wife, Nancy, and their
children, but chose not to. He married an Englishwoman and returned to the
stage, performing for the remainder of the decade throughout Great Britain, in
a traveling one-man version of Black History Month. The consummate
multiplatform performer, Brown created a number of personas to match his skills
as a narrator, singer, magician, hypnotist, electro-biologist and
"boxing" champion, among them "The African Prince,"
"The King of All Mesmerizers" and "Professor H. Box Brown."
Finkelman and Newman report that Brown's
British act featured "a large moving panorama to depict the history of
black people in Africa and America, as he lectured on 'African and American
Slavery.' He often appeared as an 'African Prince' as he melded antislavery
sentiments and propaganda, popular history and entertaining theatrical
production." Not one to miss a marketing opportunity, Brown took advantage
of the raging Civil War, introducing to his act in 1862 "a new lecture and
panorama called the 'Grand Moving Mirror of the American War.' " Near the
end of the war, in 1864, Brown transformed himself once again, this time into a
magician, billing himself as "Mr. H. Box Brown, the King of All
Mesmerisers."
In 1875, at the age of
60, Brown returned to the United States, touring New England with his show, now
called "The African Prince's Drawing-Room Entertainment." To the end,
Brown advertised himself as "the man 'whose escape from slavery in 1849 in
a box 3 feet 1 inch long, 2 feet wide, 2 feet six inches high, caused such a
sensation in the New England States, he having traveled from Richmond, Va. To
Philadelphia, a journey of 350 miles, packed as luggage in a box." The
last reference to Brown appeared in the Brantford, Ontario, newspaper on Feb.
26, 1889, advertising one of his performances. There is no record of his death
-- his last great disappearing act.
Source 21
Did Black People Own Slaves?
By: Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Posted: March 4, 2013 at 12:03 AM
One of the most vexing questions in
African-American history is whether free African Americans themselves owned
slaves. The short answer to this question, as you might suspect, is yes, of
course; some free black people in this country bought and sold other black
people, and did so at least since 1654, continuing to do so right through the
Civil War. For me, the really fascinating questions about black slave-owning
are how many black "masters" were involved, how many slaves did they
own and why did they own slaves?
The answers to these questions are complex, and
historians have been arguing for some time over whether free blacks purchased
family members as slaves in order to protect them -- motivated, on the one
hand, by benevolence and philanthropy, as historian Carter G. Woodson put it,
or whether, on the other hand, they purchased other black people "as an
act of exploitation," primarily to exploit their free labor for profit,
just as white slave owners did. The evidence shows that, unfortunately, both
things are true. The great African-American historian, John Hope Franklin, states this clearly: "The majority of
Negro owners of slaves had some personal interest in their property." But,
he admits, "There were instances, however, in which free Negroes had a
real economic interest in the institution of slavery and held slaves in order
to improve their economic status."
In a fascinating essay reviewing this
controversy, R. Halliburton shows that free black people have owned slaves
"in each of the thirteen original states and later in every state that
countenanced slavery," at least since Anthony Johnson and his wife Mary
went to court in Virginia in 1654 to obtain the services of their indentured
servant, a black man, John Castor, for life.
And for a time, free black people could even
"own" the services of white indentured servants in Virginia as well.
Free blacks owned slaves in Boston by 1724 and in Connecticut by 1783; by 1790,
48 black people in Maryland owned 143 slaves. One particularly notorious black
Maryland farmer named Nat Butler "regularly purchased and sold Negroes for
the Southern trade," Halliburton wrote.
Perhaps the most insidious or desperate attempt
to defend the right of black people to own slaves was the statement made on the
eve of the Civil War by a group of free people of color in New Orleans,
offering their services to the Confederacy, in part because they were
fearful for their own enslavement: "The free colored population [native]
of Louisiana … own slaves, and they are dearly attached to their native land …
and they are ready to shed their blood for her defense. They have no sympathy
for abolitionism; no love for the North, but they have plenty for Louisiana …
They will fight for her in 1861 as they fought [to defend New Orleans from the
British] in 1814-1815."
These guys were, to put it bluntly,
opportunists par excellence: As Noah Andre Trudeau and James G. Hollandsworth Jr. explain, once
the war broke out, some of these same black men formed 14 companies of a
militia composed of 440 men and were organized by the governor in May 1861 into
"the Native Guards, Louisiana," swearing to fight to defend the
Confederacy. Although given no combat role, the Guards -- reaching a peak of
1,000 volunteers -- became the first Civil War unit to appoint black
officers.
When New Orleans fell in
late April 1862 to the Union, about 10 percent of these men, not missing a
beat, now formed the Native Guard/Corps d'Afrique to defend the Union. Joel A.
Rogers noted this phenomenon in his 100 Amazing Facts: "The
Negro slave-holders, like the white ones, fought to keep their chattels in the
Civil War." Rogers also notes that some black men, including those in New
Orleans at the outbreak of the War, "fought to perpetuate slavery."
How Many Slaves Did Blacks Own?
So what do the actual numbers of black slave
owners and their slaves tell us? In 1830, the year most carefully studied by
Carter G. Woodson, about 13.7 percent (319,599) of the black population was
free. Of these, 3,776 free Negroes owned 12,907 slaves, out of a total of
2,009,043 slaves owned in the entire United States, so the numbers of slaves
owned by black people over all was quite small by comparison with the number
owned by white people. In his essay, " 'The Known World' of Free Black Slaveholders,"
Thomas J. Pressly, using Woodson's statistics, calculated that 54 (or about 1
percent) of these black slave owners in 1830 owned between 20 and 84 slaves;
172 (about 4 percent) owned between 10 to 19 slaves; and 3,550 (about 94
percent) each owned between 1 and 9 slaves. Crucially, 42 percent owned just
one slave.
Pressly also shows that the percentage of free
black slave owners as the total number of free black heads of families was
quite high in several states, namely 43 percent in South Carolina, 40 percent
in Louisiana, 26 percent in Mississippi, 25 percent in Alabama and 20 percent
in Georgia. So why did these free black people own these slaves?
It is reasonable to assume that the 42 percent
of the free black slave owners who owned just one slave probably owned a family
member to protect that person, as did many of the other black slave owners who
owned only slightly larger numbers of slaves. As Woodson put it in 1924's Free
Negro Owners of Slaves in the United States in 1830, "The census
records show that the majority of the Negro owners of slaves were such from the
point of view of philanthropy. In many instances the husband purchased the wife
or vice versa … Slaves of Negroes were in some cases the children of a free
father who had purchased his wife. If he did not thereafter emancipate the
mother, as so many such husbands failed to do, his own children were born his
slaves and were thus reported to the numerators."
Moreover, Woodson explains, "Benevolent
Negroes often purchased slaves to make their lot easier by granting them their
freedom for a nominal sum, or by permitting them to work it out on liberal
terms." In other words, these black slave-owners, the clear majority,
cleverly used the system of slavery to protect their loved ones. That's the
good news.
But not all did, and that
is the bad news. Halliburton concludes, after examining the evidence, that
"it would be a serious mistake to automatically assume that free blacks
owned their spouse or children only for benevolent purposes." Woodson
himself notes that a "small number of slaves, however, does not always
signify benevolence on the part of the owner." And John Hope Franklin notes that in North
Carolina, "Without doubt, there were those who possessed slaves for the
purpose of advancing their [own] well-being … these Negro slaveholders were
more interested in making their farms or carpenter-shops 'pay' than they were
in treating their slaves humanely." For these black slaveholders, he
concludes, "there was some effort to conform to the pattern established by
the dominant slaveholding group within the State in the effort to elevate
themselves to a position of respect and privilege." In other words, most
black slave owners probably owned family members to protect them, but far too
many turned to slavery to exploit the labor of other black people for profit.
Who Were These Black Slave Owners?
If we were compiling a "Rogues Gallery of
Black History," the following free black slaveholders would be in it:
John Carruthers Stanly -- born a slave in
Craven County, N.C., the son of an Igbo mother and her master, John Wright
Stanly -- became an extraordinarily successful barber and speculator in real
estate in New Bern. As Loren Schweninger points out in Black Property Owners in the South, 1790-1915,
by the early 1820s, Stanly owned three plantations and 163 slaves, and even
hired three white overseers to manage his property! He fathered six
children with a slave woman named Kitty, and he eventually freed them. Stanly
lost his estate when a loan for $14,962 he had co-signed with his white half
brother, John, came due. After his brother's stroke, the loan was Stanly's sole
responsibility, and he was unable to pay it.
William Ellison's fascinating story is told by
Michael Johnson and James L. Roark in their book, Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South.
At his death on the eve of the Civil War, Ellison was wealthier than nine out
of 10 white people in South Carolina. He was born in 1790 as a slave on a
plantation in the Fairfield District of the state, far up country from
Charleston. In 1816, at the age of 26, he bought his own freedom, and soon
bought his wife and their child. In 1822, he opened his own cotton gin, and
soon became quite wealthy. By his death in 1860, he owned 900 acres of land and
63 slaves. Not one of his slaves was allowed to purchase his or her own
freedom.
Louisiana, as we have seen, was its own bizarre
world of color, class, caste and slavery. By 1830, in Louisiana, several black
people there owned a large number of slaves, including the following: In Pointe
Coupee Parish alone, Sophie Delhonde owned 38 slaves; Lefroix Decuire owned 59
slaves; Antoine Decuire owned 70 slaves; Leandre Severin owned 60 slaves; and
Victor Duperon owned 10. In St. John the Baptist Parish, Victoire Deslondes
owned 52 slaves; in Plaquemine Brule, Martin Donatto owned 75 slaves; in Bayou
Teche, Jean B. Muillion owned 52 slaves; Martin Lenormand in St. Martin Parish
owned 44 slaves; Verret Polen in West Baton Rouge Parish owned 69 slaves;
Francis Jerod in Washita Parish owned 33 slaves; and Cecee McCarty in the Upper
Suburbs of New Orleans owned 32 slaves. Incredibly, the 13 members of the
Metoyer family in Natchitoches Parish -- including Nicolas Augustin Metoyer,
pictured -- collectively owned 215 slaves
Antoine Dubuclet and his wife Claire Pollard
owned more than 70 slaves in Iberville Parish when they married. According to
Thomas Clarkin, by 1864, in the midst of the Civil War, they owned 100 slaves,
worth $94,700. During Reconstruction, he became the state's first black
treasurer, serving between 1868 and 1878.
Andrew Durnford was a sugar planter and a
physician who owned the St. Rosalie plantation, 33 miles south of New Orleans.
In the late 1820s, David O. Whitten tells us, he paid $7,000
for seven male slaves, five females and two children. He traveled all the way
to Virginia in the 1830s and purchased 24 more. Eventually, he would own 77
slaves. When a fellow Creole slave owner liberated 85 of his slaves and shipped
them off to Liberia, Durnford commented that he couldn't do that, because
"self interest is too strongly rooted in the bosom of all that breathes
the American atmosphere."
It would be a mistake to think that large black
slaveholders were only men. In 1830, in Louisiana, the aforementioned Madame
Antoine Dublucet owned 44 slaves, and Madame Ciprien Ricard owned 35 slaves,
Louise Divivier owned 17 slaves, Genevieve Rigobert owned 16 slaves and Rose
Lanoix and Caroline Miller both owned 13 slaves, while over in Georgia, Betsey
Perry owned 25 slaves. According to Johnson and Roark, the wealthiest black
person in Charleston, S.C., in 1860 was Maria Weston, who owned 14 slaves and
property valued at more than $40,000, at a time when the average white man
earned about $100 a year. (The city's largest black slaveholders, though, were
Justus Angel and Mistress L. Horry, both of whom owned 84 slaves.)
In Savannah, Ga., between 1823 and 1828,
according to Betty Wood's Gender, Race, and Rank in a
Revolutionary Age, Hannah Leion owned nine slaves, while the largest
slaveholder in 1860 was Ciprien Ricard, who had a sugarcane plantation in
Louisiana and owned 152 slaves with her son, Pierre -- many more that the 35
she owned in 1830. According to economic historian Stanley Engerman, "In
Charleston, South Carolina about 42 percent of free blacks owned slaves in
1850, and about 64 percent of these slaveholders were women." Greed, in
other words, was gender-blind.
Why They Owned SlavesThese
men and women, from William Stanly to Madame Ciprien Ricard, were among the
largest free Negro slaveholders, and their motivations were neither benevolent
nor philanthropic. One would be hard-pressed to account for their ownership of
such large numbers of slaves except as avaricious, rapacious, acquisitive and
predatory.
But lest we romanticize all of those small
black slave owners who ostensibly purchased family members only for
humanitarian reasons, even in these cases the evidence can be problematic.
Halliburton, citing examples from an essay in the North American Review by
Calvin Wilson in 1905, presents some hair-raising challenges to the idea that
black people who owned their own family members always treated them well:
A free black in Trimble County, Kentucky,
" … sold his own son and daughter South, one for $1,000, the other for
$1,200." … A Maryland father sold his slave children in order to purchase
his wife. A Columbus, Georgia, black woman -- Dilsey Pope -- owned her husband.
"He offended her in some way and she sold him … " Fanny Canady of
Louisville, Kentucky, owned her husband Jim -- a drunken cobbler -- whom she
threatened to "sell down the river." At New Bern, North Carolina, a
free black wife and son purchased their slave husband-father. When the newly
bought father criticized his son, the son sold him to a slave trader. The son
boasted afterward that "the old man had gone to the corn fields about New
Orleans where they might learn him some manners."
Carter Woodson, too, tells us that some of the
husbands who purchased their spouses "were not anxious to liberate their
wives immediately. They considered it advisable to put them on probation for a
few years, and if they did not find them satisfactory they would sell their
wives as other slave holders disposed of Negroes." He then relates the
example of a black man, a shoemaker in Charleston, S.C., who purchased his wife
for $700. But "on finding her hard to please, he sold her a few months
thereafter for $750, gaining $50 by the transaction."
Most of us will find the news that some black
people bought and sold other black people for profit quite distressing, as well
we should. But given the long history of class divisions in the black
community, which Martin R. Delany as early as the 1850s
described as "a nation within a nation," and given the role of African elites in the long history of the
Trans-Atlantic slave trade, perhaps we should not be surprised that
we can find examples throughout black history of just about every sort of human
behavior, from the most noble to the most heinous, that we find in any other
people's history.
The good news, scholars agree, is that by 1860 the
number of free blacks owning slaves had markedly decreased from 1830. In fact,
Loren Schweninger concludes that by the eve of the Civil War, "the
phenomenon of free blacks owning slaves had nearly disappeared" in the
Upper South, even if it had not in places such as Louisiana in the Lower South.
Nevertheless, it is a very sad aspect of African-American history that slavery
sometimes could be a colorblind affair, and that the evil business of owning
another human being could manifest itself in both males and females, and in
black as well as white.
Source 22
"All servants imported and brought into the
Country...who were not Christians in their native Country...shall be accounted
and be slaves. All Negro, mulatto and Indian slaves within this
dominion...shall be held to be real estate. If any slave resist his
master...correcting such slave, and shall happen to be killed in such
correction...the master shall be free of all punishment ...as if such accident
never happened." Virginia
Slave Statute, 1705
Source 23
January
4, 2013, Escaping Slavery
By
CHARLES M. BLOW
America
has slavery on the brain these days.
There
were the recent releases of the movies “Lincoln” (which I found enlightening
and enjoyable) and “Django Unchained” (which I found a profound love story with
an orgy of excesses and muddled moralities). I guess my preferences reflect my
penchant for subtlety. Sometimes a little bit of an unsettling thing goes a
long way, and a lot goes too far. Aside from its gratuitous goriness, “Django
Unchained” reportedly used the N-word more than 100 times. “Lincoln” used it
only a handful. I don’t know exactly where my threshold is, but I think it’s
well shy of the century mark.
And
there was this week the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, one
of the most important documents in this country’s archives.
All
of this has caused me to think deeply about the long shadow of slavery, the
legacy of that most grievous enterprise and the ways in which that poison tree
continues to bear fruit.
To
be sure, America has moved light-years forward from the days of slavery. But
the idea that progress toward racial harmony would or should be steady and
continuous is fraying. And the pillars of the institution — the fundamental
devaluation of dark skin and strained justifications for the unconscionable —
have proved surprisingly resilient.
For
instance, in October, The Arkansas Times reported that Jon Hubbard, a Republican
state representative, wrote in a 2009 self-published book that “the institution
of slavery that the black race has long believed to be an abomination upon its
people may actually have been a blessing in disguise.” His misguided point was
that for all the horrors of slavery, blacks were better off in America than in
Africa.
This
was a prevailing, wrongheaded, ethically empty justification for American
slavery when it was legal.
Robert
E. Lee wrote in 1856: “The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in
Africa, morally, physically, and socially. The painful discipline they are
undergoing is necessary for their further instruction as a race, and will
prepare them, I hope, for better things.”
And
in a famous 1837 speech on the Senate floor, John C. Calhoun declared: “I hold
that in the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin,
and distinguished by color, and other physical differences, as well as
intellectual, are brought together, the relation now existing in the
slaveholding States between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good — a
positive good.”
Lee
was later appointed commander in chief of the armies of the South, and Calhoun
had been vice president and became secretary of state. But in November, Hubbard
lost his seat; I guess that’s progress.
Still,
the persistence of such a ridiculous argument does not sit well with me. And we
should all be unsettled by the tendency of some people to romanticize and empathize
with the Confederacy.
A Pew Research Center poll released in April
2011 found that most Southern whites think it’s appropriate for modern-day
politicians to praise Confederate leaders, the only demographic to believe
that.
A CNN poll also released that month found
that nearly 4 in 10 white Southerners sympathize more with the Confederacy than
with the Union.
What
is perhaps more problematic is that negative attitudes about blacks are
increasing. According to an October survey by The Associated Press: “In all, 51
percent of Americans now express explicit anti-black attitudes, compared with
48 percent in a similar 2008 survey. When measured by an implicit racial
attitudes test, the number of Americans with anti-black sentiments jumped to 56
percent, up from 49 percent during the last presidential election.”
Not
progress.
In
fact, it feels as though slavery as an analogy has become subversively chic.
Herman Cain, running as a Republican presidential candidate, built an entire
campaign around this not-so-coded language, saying
that he had left “the Democrat plantation,” calling blacks “brainwashed” and arguing, “I don’t believe
racism in this country today holds anybody back in a big way.”
As
the best-selling author Michelle Alexander pointed out in her sensational 2010
book “The New Jim Crow,” various factors, including the methodical mass
incarceration of black men, has led to the disintegration of the black family,
the disenfranchisement of millions of people, and a new and very real era of
American oppression.
As
Alexander confirmed to me Friday: “Today there are more African-American adults
under correctional control — in prison or jail, on probation or parole — than
were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.”
Definitely not progress.
Source 24
TABLE 2
Population of the South 1790-1860
by type
|
Year
|
White
|
Free Nonwhite
|
Slave
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
1790
|
1,240,454
|
32,523
|
654,121
|
|
1800
|
1,691,892
|
61,575
|
851,532
|
|
1810
|
2,118,144
|
97,284
|
1,103,700
|
|
1820
|
2,867,454
|
130,487
|
1,509,904
|
|
1830
|
3,614,600
|
175,074
|
1,983,860
|
|
1840
|
4,601,873
|
207,214
|
2,481,390
|
|
1850
|
6,184,477
|
235,821
|
3,200,364
|
|
1860
|
8,036,700
|
253,082
|
3,950,511
|
Source: Historical Statistics of the U.S.
(1970).
Holdings of Southern Slaveowners
by
states, 1860
|
State
|
Total
|
Held 1
|
Held 2
|
Held 3
|
Held 4
|
Held 5
|
Held 1-5
|
Held 100-
|
Held 500+
|
|
|
slaveholders
|
slave
|
slaves
|
Slaves
|
slaves
|
slaves
|
slaves
|
499 slaves
|
slaves
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
AL
|
33,730
|
5,607
|
3,663
|
2,805
|
2,329
|
1,986
|
16,390
|
344
|
-
|
|
AR
|
11,481
|
2,339
|
1,503
|
1,070
|
894
|
730
|
6,536
|
65
|
1
|
|
DE
|
587
|
237
|
114
|
74
|
51
|
34
|
510
|
-
|
-
|
|
FL
|
5,152
|
863
|
568
|
437
|
365
|
285
|
2,518
|
47
|
-
|
|
GA
|
41,084
|
6,713
|
4,335
|
3,482
|
2,984
|
2,543
|
20,057
|
211
|
8
|
|
KY
|
38,645
|
9,306
|
5,430
|
4,009
|
3,281
|
2,694
|
24,720
|
7
|
-
|
|
LA
|
22,033
|
4,092
|
2,573
|
2,034
|
1,536
|
1,310
|
11,545
|
543
|
4
|
|
MD
|
13,783
|
4,119
|
1,952
|
1,279
|
1,023
|
815
|
9,188
|
16
|
-
|
|
MS
|
30,943
|
4,856
|
3,201
|
2,503
|
2,129
|
1,809
|
14,498
|
315
|
1
|
|
MO
|
24,320
|
6,893
|
3,754
|
2,773
|
2,243
|
1,686
|
17,349
|
4
|
-
|
|
NC
|
34,658
|
6,440
|
4,017
|
3,068
|
2,546
|
2,245
|
18,316
|
133
|
-
|
|
SC
|
26,701
|
3,763
|
2,533
|
1,990
|
1,731
|
1,541
|
11,558
|
441
|
8
|
|
TN
|
36,844
|
7,820
|
4,738
|
3,609
|
3,012
|
2,536
|
21,715
|
47
|
-
|
|
TX
|
21,878
|
4,593
|
2,874
|
2,093
|
1,782
|
1,439
|
12,781
|
54
|
-
|
|
VA
|
52,128
|
11,085
|
5,989
|
4,474
|
3,807
|
3,233
|
28,588
|
114
|
-
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
TOTAL
|
393,967
|
78,726
|
47,244
|
35,700
|
29,713
|
24,886
|
216,269
|
2,341
|
22
|
Source: Historical
Statistics of the United States (1970).
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