When interviewed, Matthew Hume and his wife had been married sixty-two years and had lived in the same community for fifty-five years. According to the fieldworker, they were highly respected by their neighbors. Matthew could not understand the attitude of former slaves who preferred to remain on the plantations, receiving only food and shelter, rather than to be free citizens with the right to develop as individuals.
Matthew told many interesting stories about the part that slavery had played in his family. He said that, on the whole, his family was fortunate in having a good master who would not keep an overseer who whipped his slaves.
His father, Luke Hume, lived in Trimble County, Kentucky, and was allowed to raise an acre of tobacco, an acre of corn, garden vegetables, and chickens for himself. He also could have the milk and butter from one cow. He was advised by the overseer to save his money, but Matthew said his father always drank it up. On this plantation all the slaves were free from Saturday noon until Monday morning, as well as on Christmas and the Fourth of July. A majority of them would go to Bedford or Milton and drink, gamble, and fight.
On the neighboring farm, the slaves were treated cruelly. Matthew had a brother-in-law, Steve Lewis, who carried marks on his back. For years he had a sore that would not heal where his owner had struck him with a blacksnake whip.
When Matthew was a small boy, he was placed in the fields to hoe. He was so small, and his hoe was in such bad shape, that he was unable to keep up with the other workers to hear what they were talking about. One day while bringing up the rear, he saw a large rock, which he carefully covered with dirt. Then he came down hard on the rock and broke his hoe. Instead of getting a whipping, he got a new hoe to replace the broken one. With the new hoe, he could keep close enough to the other workers to hear their conversations.
Another of his duties was to bring in the cattle. He had to walk around the road about a mile to get them, but was permitted to come back through the fields, which was only about a quarter of a mile. One afternoon his mistress told him to bring a load of wood when he came in. In the summer it was the custom to have the children carry wood from the fields. When he came up, he saw that the master’s wife was angry. This annoyed him, so he stalked into the hall and slammed the wood into the box. She shoved him into a small closet and locked the door, but his howling soon brought his mother and father to the rescue.
As soon as children were old enough, they were sent to the fields to prepare the ground for setting out tobacco plants, which Matthew said was a very complicated procedure. First the ground was formed into large hills, each requiring about four feet of soil. Then children pulverized the clods and placed a foot in the center of each hill, leaving a track in the smoothed soil. The plants were set in the center of these hills. Woe to the youngster who failed to pulverize a hill, according to Matthew.
After one plowing, the tobacco was hand-tended. It was long, green, and divided into two grades. It was pressed by being weighted down in large hogsheads. On one occasion they were told their tobacco was so eaten up that worms were sitting on the fence waiting for the leaves to grow, but somehow his owner hid the defects and received the best price paid in the community.
The slaveholder’s wife on a neighboring plantation was a devout Catholic, and she had all the children come each Sunday afternoon to study the catechism and repeat the Lord’s Prayer. She was not very successful in training them in the Catholic faith, for when they grew up most of them became either Baptists or Methodists. Matthew said she did a lot of good in leading them to Christ, but he did not learn much of the catechism, as he attended only for the treats. He said that after the service they always had candy or a cup of sugar.
On the Preston place there was a big, strapping eighteen-year-old slave named Smith who was regularly whipped by an overseer. Smith went to Matthew’s owner and asked for help, but was told that he would have to seek help elsewhere, which he did on the Payne farm. The next time Smith was tied to a tree and severely beaten, they were afraid to untie him. When the overseer finally dared to loosen the ropes, Smith kicked him as hard as he could and ran to the Payne estate and refused to return. He was a good worker on the Payne farm, where he received kind treatment.
A bad overseer was discharged once by Mr. Payne because of his cruelty to Luke Hume. The corncrib was so tiny that a man had to climb out one leg at a time. One morning, just as Matthew’s father was climbing out with his feed, he was struck over the head with a large club. The next morning Luke broke the scoop off an iron shovel and fastened the handle to his body. This time he swung himself from the door of the crib, and seeing the overseer hiding to strike him, he threw the handle, which wounded the man’s head, though it did not knock him out. As soon as Mr. Payne heard of the disturbance, the overseer was discharged and Mr. Mack was placed in charge of the slaves.
One way of exacting obedience was to threaten to send offenders south to work in the fields. The slaves around Lexington, Kentucky, came out ahead on one occasion. The slave collector was named Shrader. He had the slaves handcuffed to a large log chain and forced onto a flatboat. There were so many that the boat was grounded, so some of the slaves were released to push the boat off. Among the blacks was one who could read and write. Before Shrader could chain them up again, he was seized, chained, taken below Memphis, Tennessee, and forced to work in the cotton fields until he was able to get word from Richmond identifying him. In the meantime, the educated black issued freedom papers to his companions. Many of them came back to Lexington, Kentucky, where they were employed.
Matthew thought the Emancipation Proclamation was Abraham Lincoln’s greatest achievement. The slaves on his plantation, however, did not learn of it until the following August. Then Mr. Payne and his sons offered to let them live on their ground under an agreement similar to renting and giving them a share of the crop. They remained there until January 1, 1865, when they crossed the Ohio at Madison. They had a cow that had been given to them before the Emancipation Proclamation, but it was taken away from them. So they came to Indiana homeless, friendless, and penniless.