November–December 1854
James Redpath (1833–1889) was Scottish-born, but emigrated to the United States in his teens. He worked for Horace Greeley as a reporter for the New York Tribune. In 1855, Redpath moved to Kansas and worked with John Brown to ensure that Kansas would enter the Union as a free state. Subsequently, he not only participated in a daring, but futile attempt to rescue Brown at Harpers Ferry, but he also wrote Brown’s first biography, as well as dedicated Roving Editor to Captain John Brown. After visiting Haiti in 1860, he successfully lobbied the United States government to recognize the black republic. However, he abandoned his effort to get skilled, free blacks to immigrate to Haiti. During the Civil War, Redpath served as a war correspondent, and then, in 1865, as the first public schools superintendent in Charleston, South Carolina. He quickly lost this job, because he urged the Johnson administration to protect freedmen’s rights.
Redpath’s varied career took even more unusual turns when he organized one of the country’s first professional lecture booking agencies. Redpath himself lectured in Ireland in the 1880s, returning to the United States as an Irish nationalist. His most unusual turn, however, was his late nineteenth-century friendship with Jefferson Davis. That relationship began when Redpath convinced Davis to write for the North American Review, which Redpath edited. In time, he spent several months in Davis’s house near Biloxi, helped Davis with his history of the Confederacy, and even helped Davis’s widow with her husband’s biography.
In the 1850s, Redpath visited the South three times. The intent of the extreme abolitionist was to test his views on Southern slavery. His research method was unique: he walked, including a trip from Richmond to Montgomery. Walking afforded opportunities to interview thousands of slaves. He travelled incognito, and published his letters first in New York National Anti-Slavery Standard under the pseudonym John Ball Jr., referring to the English priest John Ball, one of the three leaders of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. In fact, Redpath himself advocated simultaneous slave revolts in the South. He exhibited the moral certainty of a fanatic, believing that evil deserved evil.
James Redpath, Roving Editor: or, Talks with Slaves in the Southern States (New York: A. B. Burdick, 1859), 171–176.
ALABAMA.
I walked the entire distance from Atlanta, Georgia, to Montgomery, Alabama. As I intend to revisit that country at the earliest opportunity, I will not here narrate my adventures on this journey. They would probably discover me—not my mere name, but personality. That I desire to avoid. Alabama, as the reader most probably is aware, is preeminently the Assassin State; for it has still on the pages of its statute book a law authorizing the payment of $5,000 for the head of Mr. Garrison, dead or alive.
The result of my journey are thus recorded in a letter from Montgomery:
CONTENTMENT OF SLAVES IN ALABAMA.
I have spoken with hundreds of slaves in Alabama, but never yet met one contented with his position under the “peculiar” constitutions of the South. But neither have I met with many slaves who are actively discontented with involuntary servitude. Their discontent is passive only. They neither hope, nor grumble, nor threaten. I never advised a single slave either in Georgia or Alabama to run away. It is too great a responsibility to incur. The distance is too far; the opportunities and chances of escape too few. The slaves, I found, regard themselves as the victims of a system of injustice from which the only earthly hope of escape is—the grave!
RAILROAD HANDS.
The shareholders of the railroad from West Point, Georgia, to Montgomery, Alabama, own all the slaves who are employed in grading, pumping, wood cutting, engine firing, and in other necessary labors along the line. These men are the most favored sons of Africa employed in the country, in the States of Alabama or Georgia. They are hard worked from sun to sun, and from Christmas to Christmas, but they are well fed and clothed, and comfortably lodged—comfortably, that is for negro slaves.
THEIR ALLOWANCE.
They receive five pounds of pork, a pint of molasses, and one peck of meal each per week; three suits of clothes, a blanket and a hat a year. But they have no wives. They are chiefly by birth Virginians, and were nearly all bought in the Old Dominion eleven years ago. The majority that I spoke with were married men and fathers at the time of the purchase; but, as the railroad company had no need of female servants, their “Domestic Institutions” were broken up, and—wifeless and childless—the poor “fellows” (as they are called), were transported south, and condemned for life to Alabama celibacy and adultery. Of course, He who, amid the lightnings of Mount Sinai, uttered the command, “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” was the founder of the system of slavery in America which breeds such crimes, and many others of the same character, but far more odious in their nature! Of course? Don’t the Southern clergy and the Rev. South-Side Adams, of Instantaneous Conversion and Instantaneous Rendition notoriety, announce the fact? And don’t they know?
Several of these hands, as they frankly owned, have cohabited with plantation slaves since their arrival in Alabama. All of them, of course, resemble Napoleon in one respect—they are “no Capuchins.” One of them—a bachelor when sold, and who had been clerically married here—remarked to me:
“Yes, mass’r, I’se been married; but it’s no satisfaction for a man in this country.”
“Why?”
“’Cause, mass’r,” he replied, “you see white folks here don’t know nothin’ ’bout farmin’. Dey buy a place and use it up in two or tree years, and den dey go away agin. So we’s never sartin of our girls ’bove a year or two.”
When about fifty miles distant from Montgomery, I saw a young man of color, well dressed—rather a dandy, in fact—walking along the road in company with a country-looking slave, near the railroad depot. I overtook him and soon began to inquire into his history. He spoke our language as correctly as any educated man does in ordinary conversation. He was a manly looking person and very intelligent.
He was a slave; by trade a carpenter. He hired his own time—that is to say, he paid his owner $300 annually as body rent, boarded and clothed himself, and retained whatever money he made after defraying expenses. He was twenty-eight years of age. Last year he saved $100. Altogether, since he first cherished a hope of purchasing his freedom, he had succeeded in saving $930.
“How much does your boss ask for you?”
“He said he would not sell me for less than $2,500. He was offered $2,000 cash down. I hope to buy myself for less. I was raised with him from a child, and I expect that he will let me buy my freedom for $2,400 on that account.”
“$2,400!” I exclaimed, “and you have only got $900 yet. Why it will take you fourteen years to buy yourself at that rate.”
“I know that, sir,” he replied, “but I can’t help myself; you see he has the advantage of me.”
“Yes,” I returned, “but you have got $930 the advantage of him. Once on the road, you could travel rapidly to the North, as you could easily pay all your expenses, and would not have to run the ordinary risks of a runaway. If I was in your place,” I added, “I would see your boss in a hotter climate than this, before I would pay him the first red cent. Can’t you get any one to write you your free papers?”
“That’s what I want, sir,” he said—his eyes flashed as he looked on me and said it—“but I’m afraid to ask: I dare not trust any of the white men I know.”
“I’ll write them,” I replied, “if you will get me free papers to copy from. I don’t know how free papers are worded; but if you will show them to me, I will willingly make out yours.”
He joyfully promised to furnish me with the “copy” desired, and appointed a place of meeting in Montgomery.
Alas for the poor fellow! Either I mistook the place of rendezvous, or, fearing betrayal, he was afraid to meet me.
OTHER SLAVES AND SLAVE SALES.
My washerwoman in Montgomery hired her own time also. She paid her owner $200 a year; lived in a house rented by herself; was entirely self-supported in every respect.
Another man I spoke with—a plasterer—paid his owner $600 annually. He was a very intelligent and skillful mechanic. He would have sold for $4,000.
These persons never see their owners, excepting only when they pay their body-rent. Of course, this demonstrates that the negroes need a master to take care of them. And does it not prove, too, that American slavery is a patriarchal institution, with a vengeance and a half?
The first things that I saw on entering Montgomery were three large posters, whose captions read respectively thus:
“Negroes at auction!”
“Negroes at auction!”
“Negroes for sale!”
Three distinct sales of immortal souls within a few days were thus unblushingly announced. I saw two of them. In one instance, the auctioneer turned, as coolly as an iceberg incarnate, from the last of the negroes whom he sold, to a mule with a buggy and harness. Hardly had the word—“Gone!” escaped his lips, as he finished the sale of the “fellow,” than he began:
“The next lot that I shall offer you, gentlemen, is a mule with a buggy and harness. This lot,” etc.
The negroes brought very high prices. It is interesting to observe how the enlargement of commercial relations makes the interest of one nation the interest of every one with which it has extended intercourse. The Eastern [Crimean] war, which England was waging at the time, was the immediate cause of these inhuman auctions. Cotton was selling at so very reduced a figure, that many of the planters were compelled to dispose of a portion of their human live stock, in order to provide subsistence for the others. And this, you know, is one of the beauties of this beautiful institution.
A GODLY CITY.
Montgomery is a very handsome city. It supports two churches, one weekly (temperance), one tri-weekly, and two daily papers. Population, at that time, nearly nine thousand. It is the capital of Alabama.
Montgomery, albeit, is a very godly city. It is true that its citizens sell human beings on week days; but then—and let it be remembered to its lasting honor—it imposes a fine of thirteen dollars for every separate offence and weed, on any and every unrighteous dealer who sells a cigar on Sunday!
Let us smoke!