Part One
LEST WE FORGET
THE PASSAGE FROM AFRICA TO SLAVERY AND EMANCIPATION
Jack and Abby Landlord, aged one hundred and one hundred and ten years, circa 1868.
Africa Before the Slave Trade
Europeans have long considered Africa to be a strange and mysterious place. Many called it the Dark Continent, but to Africans and the enlightened Europeans who came to know it, Africa was a land kissed by the gods.
Africa is the home of the Nile, the world’s longest river; the Sahara, the world’s largest desert; and Mount Kilimanjaro, one of the world’s highest mountains. It is the home of Egypt and Timbuktu, cradles of civilization, commerce, medicine, mathematics, and knowledge. It is at the birthplace of all life; the land where human life began some four million years ago.
Before the Europeans came, my people were known by their indigenous names. They were the Bambara, the Mende, the Ewe, the Akan, the Kimbundi, the Zulu, the Hausa, and the Teso—just to name a few. Africans called their empires the Songhai, Mali, Katsina, and Kanem-Bornu. Before my people spoke English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish—languages of their European conquerors—they spoke Twi, Fula, Hausa, Shona, and a thousand other African languages.
This was before the invasion of the Europeans. Before Africa was theirs, she belonged to the black man. It was not until the fifteenth century, when European powers entered Africa, first for gold, then for people to enslave, that the face of Africa changed. They called our lands the Gold Coast, the Ivory Coast, the Grain Coast, and soon, the Slave Coast, labeling them according to the riches they could exploit. In 1884, after 200 years of reaping the economic benefits of enslaved African labor, European powers met in Berlin to decide who would control the land, setting the stage for the “scramble for Africa.” They carved Africa into pieces among themselves, claiming its wealth and exerting their military and political power. It would not be until the 1950s, through armed struggle and resistance, that Africa would again be ruled by Africans.
A 19th-century engraving of an Africa village with huts, from a book titled The World’s Wonders as Seen by the Great Tropical and Polar Explorers, published in London, 1883.
Why should one learn about the changing history of Africa? Because the slave trade and colonialism halted Africa’s growth and development. Africa, the birthplace of mankind, the giver of religion, civilization, and science, the “dark” continent from which the light of knowledge emerged, is a great land. If you want to know the Africa of our ancestors, look to Africa from the beginning of civilization—the Africa before the arrival of the Portuguese and other foreign invaders.
Map of Africa’s west coast where slave trade thrived, circa 1743.
The Price of Man
It must have been a strange sight: unfamiliar men arriving in tall ships from foreign lands. They came, they said, as friends—to trade for ivory, spices, and gold. They returned a few years later, this time wanting something more: “black gold”—men, women, and children to work as slaves on the lands they had just colonized.
The fifteenth century found Europe wielding the sword for expansion, capitalism, and the spread of Christianity. Eager to claim souls for the Church, markets for the Crown, and materials for its emerging commercial economy, Europe, led by the Portuguese, sailed for Africa and lands beyond. In 1435 the Portuguese established trading posts along the coast of Senegal. In 1441 the Portuguese sailor Antão Gonçalves returned from Africa with ten Africans. So delighted were the Portuguese with the “black ones” that subsequent venturers returned with 235 more. In 1455 the pope authorized Portugal to reduce to servitude all infidel people.
Asiento for the Trade. Contracts or agreements (called asientos) were granted for a fee to favored slave traders. Decrees such as this one granted the wholesale enslavement and transport of African people to South America and Spanish colonies. (See here for transcription.)
But it was Christopher Columbus’s “discovery” of the New World in 1492 and the introduction of sugarcane to the Spanish West Indies that turned slave trading into big business. The great sugar plantations needed cheap labor. At first the Spanish enslaved the native Arawak Indians. When slavery nearly decimated the native population, Spain turned to what it deemed the next best alternative—Africa—where there seemed to be an inexhaustible supply of laborers.
The goods that Africa wanted—beads, linen, iron bars, guns, and gunpowder—and letters of introduction to European slave brokers helped to ensure a profitable voyage. A woman could be purchased for sixty gallons of rum and seven pieces of cloth; a man in his prime for iron bars, two small guns, and gunpowder.
The slave market in Zanzibar, Tanzania, East Africa, in the 19th century. Engraving, published 1878.
However, the trade for men was never easy, nor simple. In the early days, traders sailed from port to port, kidnapping a few Africans and trading for goods until they had enough to make the voyage profitable. They soon abandoned this for more efficient ways of securing captives—hiring African middlemen to raid villages deep in the interior or pitting kings against each other, convincing them to sell their enemies as slaves. To entice Africans, white traders lay before them cloth, beads, rum, iron bars, and guns—lots of guns. Led by greed or the desire to protect themselves, African nations became swept up in the evil trade, eager to sell their foes for goods they wanted and weaponry they believed they needed.
Once captured, the enslaved Africans began the months-long journey from the interior to the coast. Thousands died making the trek, their bleached bones marking the trail for succeeding coffles (caravans of enslaved Africans). Upon arriving at the coastal town, the booty was laid before all to see—men and women stripped, examined, and traded for goods. Those sold were often branded, bound, and herded into slave dungeons where they were held for weeks or even months until there were enough bodies to fill a ship. There, deep inside the fanciful castles built by strangers and fortified by huge cannons, in cave cellars hewn out of massive rock with a sole grate for air and light, the transatlantic trade began.
Slavery existed in Africa (as it did in most civilized societies) before the arrival of the Europeans. Enslaved Africans were often prisoners of war, thieves, and debtors. But the treatment of the enslaved, particularly those who were viewed as servants to a family, was far different and, in general, far more humane than the chattel slavery of the Americas and the Islands. One historian writes, “In the African system…slaves, though of inferior status, had certain rights, whilst their owners had definite and often onerous duties towards them. The enslaved were used to till the earth for their owners, and were, in return, fed and clothed. Many of the tribes, notably the Mundingoes, treated their slaves very well; ‘They are remarkably kind to, and careful of their slaves…whom they treat with respect, and whom they will not suffer to be ill-used. This is a forcible lesson from the wild and savage Africans, to the more polished and enlightened Europeans who…treat them (i.e., their slaves) as if they were a lower order of creatures, and abuse them in the most shocking manner!’”1
The trade in flesh was an evil that would haunt Africa and her descendants for four hundred years. It disrupted cultures, depopulated the continent, provoked wars, and took from Africa the brightest and the strongest. No doubt those Africans who participated in the trade lived to regret their involvement.
In a letter to the King of Portugal in 1526, King Afonso of the Kongo, an African baptized and educated by white missionaries, wrote:
“We cannot reckon how great the damage [of the trade] is, since the merchants were taking every day our natives, sons of the land and the sons of our noblemen and vassals and our relatives.… We beg of Your Highness to help and assist us in the matter, commanding your factors [buying agents] that they should not send either merchants or wares, because it is our will that in these Kingdoms there should not be any trade of slaves nor outlet for them.…”2
King Afonso’s plea fell on deaf ears. The trade was underway, and once it began, it would be hundreds of years before it was halted.
Trade beads, used between the 16th and 20th centuries as currency for goods, services, and slaves, were often used to exploit African resources by early Europeans.
Horrors of the Middle Passage
Few can imagine the horrors that awaited my people aboard the slave vessels. The filth, the stench, the loss of life, the disease, the packing of men in spaces so tight that they could neither turn, nor stand, nor squat, nor sit, is beyond human comprehension. Yet such were the conditions that my people were forced to bear during the hellish journey from Africa to the New World—the journey known as the Middle Passage, or Maafa (“the massive disaster”).
For fifty days or more, my people were forced to live like animals, caged in spaces as tight as coffins. Captains shared two schools of thought. Tight packers herded as many Africans aboard as possible, arguing that the net receipts from sales of the enslaved would offset the number who died on board. Loose packers preferred to give their captives “breathing room,” trusting that more would survive the journey under sanitary conditions. So great was the profit from the sale of the enslaved that most European captains filled their vessels to the top, adding a second platform, if necessary, barely twenty inches above the heads of those below, to accommodate more.
Crammed in suffocating heat, held fast by chains bolted to the floor, forced to lie in their own waste, breathing air rancid with vomit, disease, and sickness—my people suffered unimaginable horrors. There, amid huge rats that gnawed through wood and flesh, men went mad. There, on the floors covered with blood and excrement, pregnant women gave birth. There, the living awoke, chained to the dead.
The daily routine brought little relief. Meals—horse beans pounded to a pulp and served with slabber sauce, a mixture of flour, palm oil, and water—came twice a day, once if rations ran short. This they washed down with a half or perhaps a full pint of water, the total allotment for the day. Next came the dancing of the slaves—a cruel form of exercise and amusement conducted by slave captains to keep their human cargo in salable condition. The crew played the bagpipe or forced my ancestors to beat out a rhythm as the enslaved Africans, ankles rubbed raw from the friction of the leg irons, were made to jump about.
Slaves in the Cellar of a Slave Boat, c. 1830.
But the few hours above deck ended quickly, and each evening my people again were herded below. Nighttime became a horrible nightmare. The cries of the people rose, with utterances of sorrow that filled the air. An enslaved woman interpreted her people’s lamentations and anguish, describing the noise and their howling as “owing to their having dreamt they were in their own country and finding themselves, when awake, in the hold of a slave ship.”3
It was this journey that brought millions of my people from Africa to the West Indies, North America, South America, and the countries of Europe. We do not know how many died during the voyages; conservative historians estimate fifty million. Those who endured suffered a horror unmatched in history—a horror that words can only begin to describe.
Historians state that nearly fifty-five mutinies are recorded in full detail, with passing references made to more than a hundred other attempts. My people fought valiantly, with little regard for their own lives, in efforts to take over vessels and sail back to Africa. Even the failed attempts were costly in terms of lives—both of the enslaved and the crew. Africans revolted on the slave ship Albion-Frigate by using knives (originally given to them to cut their meat) to break off their shackles and to kill a guard. Before the mutiny was over, twenty-eight Africans had been shot or, upon seeing the futility of their efforts, threw themselves overboard.
Slaves aboard a vessel. The famous diagram above shows the hold of the Vigilante, which was captured in 1822 off the coast of Africa with 345 slaves crowded in the lower decks. On other ships, like the Brookes, as many as 600 captives were crammed into the ship’s hold.
Tending to the Business at Hand
Slave trading was a risky business. Captains faced slave insurrections and mutinies; ships ran low on food; crew and human “cargo” fell to raging diseases. Sill, men and even nations vied for a share of the market of human trade. With tens of thousands of Africans being transported each year, businessmen felt the flesh trade was a gamble that would pay off handsomely in the end.
Captains were ultimately responsible for the safe landing of the slave cargo. They traded secrets and shared knowledge of the best ways to ensure a safe journey. They timed their voyages to avoid the rainy season in Africa and the hurricane season in the Caribbean, landing in the Islands in time for the crop season.
Owners gave their captains specific instructions as to which African ethnic group was preferred, the ratio of men to women, what trade items to carry, how and if the enslaved Africans should be branded, to whom they should be delivered, and where to proceed should the first market seem unprofitable. Captains kept records of the number of deaths, the amount spent to feed the cargo, how much my people sold for, the duty costs for landing slaves, the price for bargaining with African middlemen, payment due to sailors, and the enslaved taken as “captain’s privileges.” The whole operation, from landing on the coast of Africa, to loading my people aboard the slave vessel, to arriving in the Islands, was carefully calculated and thought out. Slaving was a business—the profit line mattered.
Captains maintained contact with their owners and investors, informing them of their progress in unloading their enslaved. This letter from Captain William Pinniger to Mr. Henry Livingston informs him: “I have sold good part of the slaves & hope shall get of the rest, by the time can load, which hope won’t exceed one month…” (See full transcription shown here.)
So the cries of my people were muffled by the sound of men counting English pounds and American currency. From the European and European American point of view, one could toss sickly Africans overboard because the insurance would cover the loss. In one instance, 132 ailing Africans were thrown over the side of the Zong, in hopes of saving the rest and forcing the insurers to pay. One found the stench aboard the slave ship more bearable because in reality, it was not the smell of men dying but of money in the making.
Traders learned to justify their actions; those who found the trade distasteful looked the other way. Even those who had second thoughts about their involvement learned to make peace with their profession. Wrote slaver Richard Drake, “Leclerc [his captain] and I had a chat about this Africa business. He says he’s repugnant to it and I confess it’s not a thing I like. But as my uncle argues, slaves must be bought and sold; somebody must do the trading; and why not make hay while the sun shines?”4 As long as there was a demand for slaves, there would be those who would meet it.
This Policy of Assurance is for the Sally, owned by the DeWolf family of Bristol—operators of one-quarter of Rhode Island’s slaving ventures.5 (See full transcription shown here.)
The Auction
How would you feel if it were you standing on the auction block? What range of emotions would flood your mind and your soul? How would you feel as traders handled you, examined every inch of your body, made you strip, or dance, or gauged your worth by the number of children you could sire or bear? What could alter your fate? Would your earnest tears be enough to soften a slave trader’s heart? Would passionate pleas from you or your loved ones bring mercy from one whose job it was to sell humans? Would you attempt to run or rebel? Or would you stand bravely, hoping against all odds and promising loved ones that you would come back for them, knowing deep inside that you could not?
A general view of a slave auction house in Atlanta, Georgia, circa 1850.
The auction ripped at the hearts of those enslaved more than anything—even death. Death was natural; men and women being sold like cattle wasn’t. Captains and slave traders could be a hardened, unscrupulous lot. They stopped at nothing to make a sale. In the Islands, as the ship neared shore, captains began the process of making my ancestors ready for buyers. They fed them fattening foods, oiled their bodies, pulled out gray hairs, and gave them tobacco to enliven their spirits. They devised methods for hiding disease that could adversely affect a price. Yaws could be concealed by a mixture of iron rust and gunpowder; the bloody flux by plugging oakum in the anuses of infected slaves.
African people were sold by various methods. In the West Indies, buyers favored “the scramble.” Here, the captives sold for an equal price that was agreed upon prior to the sale at the port. At the sound of a drum or gun, buyers broke through the doors of the barricade in a mad scramble for the “pick of the lot.” Many slaves, frightened by the onslaught, jumped overboard or climbed fences in vain attempts to escape. Rejected Africans, those too debilitated to fetch a full price, were taken to taverns and sold for a few dollars. Africans so sickly that no one wanted them were left on the wharf to die.
In the United States, the auction became the primary method of sale. Africans were placed on an auction block, paraded before buyers, and struck off to the highest bidder. Buyers peered into my ancestors’ mouths, prodded their limbs, examined their most intimate parts, and, if necessary, separated families in their search for the “ideal” slave. An African skilled as carpenter, tanner, horse trainer, brick layer, or such, could sell for $1,000—several hundred dollars more than an ordinary field hand. A woman who could cook or sew, bear children, or serve as a wet nurse was far more valuable than one lacking these “qualities.” Mulatto women were always valued; runaways and the old were sold at a loss.
The threat of sale was a fear that my ancestors lived with daily. It burdened their spirits; it wore on their bodies and their minds. A former enslaved man recalled: “The sale may happen at any moment and is one of the greatest miseries hanging over the head of the slave. His life is spent in fear of it. The slave may forget his hunger, bad food, hard work, lashes, but he finds no relief of the ever-threatening evil of separation.”6
A letter describing the bullish market from slave trader Davis Dupree to his colleagues, dated September 7, 1860. (See full transcription shown here.)
Mary Prince, a former enslaved woman, tells:
“He took me by the hand and led me out to the middle of the street, and turning me slowly around, exposed me to the view of those who attended the venue. I was soon surrounded by strange men who examined and handled me in the same manner that a butcher would a calf or a lamb he was about to purchase, and who talked about my shape and size in like words…I was then put up to sale…the people who stood by said that I had fetched a great sum for one so young a slave. I then saw my sisters led forth and sold to different owner…. When the sale was over, my mother hugged and kissed us and mourned over us, begging us to keep up a good heart.… It was a sad parting, one went one way, one another, and our poor mammy went home with nothing.”7
So imagine, if you will, the sound of bidding, the tears of those as they are torn from their families. What words could you use to console a grieving mother or to heal the anger of a father who feels powerless to protect his family? There, in the deepest part of your heart, see the auction block and hear the cries. Envision yourself standing there—watching your world disappear. Imagine the ringing in your ears and the ache in your heart as the auctioneer looks satisfyingly at you and cries, “Sold!” This was the pain of my ancestors, the loneliness, rage, fear, and helplessness whose depths can never be fully told.
A receipt for a slave woman named Francis, dated May 10, 1864.
Advertisements to sell or purchase enslaved Africans were common in Southern newspapers. In the ad above, Franklin & Armfield, one of the most successful slave brokers in Virginia, boasts it would pay top dollar for one hundred Negroes, ages 12–25.
From Sunup to Sundown
The slaveholder marveled at my ancestors’ ability to labor long and well. It was the enslaved labor that allowed him to turn a profit. Black bondsmen worked in the cotton fields, with full hands—healthy men and women—picking up to 150 pounds a day. They labored in the fields of sugarcane, hacking away at the razor-sharp stalks that cut their arms and faces. They toiled in the muddy, snake-infested rice fields, sowing seeds and cultivating shoots in conditions that bred mosquitoes and malaria. My people did the work that the slaveholder felt was beneath him, the work “too strenuous” for the white race, the work the slaveholder believed that strong African backs, glistening under the hot sun, were innately designed to do.
If you looked out in the dense fields, you would find my people working there. They planted corn, cured tobacco, planted hemp, cleared fields, and repaired fences. My ancestors cut down trees, pulled up potatoes, ginned cotton, planted fruit trees, plowed the land, and cared for the livestock. They killed the hogs, salted the meat, cultivated the gardens, sowed the seed, gathered peas, hauled fodder, and built slave dwellings, only to face more work—cleaning their own cabins, sewing clothes, preparing for the next meal—upon their return home. There rarely were any good memories of time spent in the fields, except for work done during Christmas, when masters gave my people a few days off, or during corn shucking, hog killing, or harvesting time, when food, drink, and fellowship were plentiful—“incentives” for peak performance.
Fourteen slaves—among them skilled mechanics—were mortgaged along with the land by the High Shoals Mining and Manufacturing Company of Gaston County, in North Carolina.
Many of the enslaved had skills but the rewards of their labor, like the slave himself, belonged to the slave masters. In cities my people were mechanics, blacksmiths, cabinet makers, bricklayers, wheelwrights, barbers, tanners, and more. My people worked in the mines, built bridges, repaired streets, and laid the railroad. Their labor was valuable; their skills often unmatched. Some slaveholders would allow their bondsman to keep a portion of what his skills earned. Many, though, simply hired the skilled slave out, keeping the profits for themselves.
The life of house slaves was little better. But whatever perks they received—cast-off clothing from the slaveholding family, first choice of food left from the master’s meals—surely paled next to the labor they performed and the indignities they suffered. They cooked the meals, nursed the children, fanned the flies, were used as foot warmers, spun the yarn, milked the cows, swept the floors, served as butlers and maids, and hauled the water. Unlike their brothers and sisters who worked in the fields, house servants’ work lasted beyond the sunset. When the evening guests came, house servants were required to work as long as visitors stayed. They were the ones who served the food, poured the tea, cleared the table, and stood awaiting every beck and call. They had to stand unflinchingly as slaveholders made cruel remarks, lashed out in rage, or hurled insults, suffering silently the abuse those in the fields could more often escape.
African American men working in a cotton gin at Dahomey, Mississippi, in 1898.
Despite their labor, my people celebrated life. My ancestors knew how to forge a life out of the most impossible situations. Life beyond the “big house” was theirs. Work shaped my people’s lives but it did not define them. To the slaveholders, Africans were beasts of burden or, at best, childlike creatures who had to be taken care of. But to each other, Africans were people—people with all of the needs and desires of humans, people who, if given the chance, could survive and prosper like any other.
Amazingly, after all the work my ancestors did, the slaveholder still classified them as lazy. That stereotype abounds today.
If my ancestors worked slowly, broke tools, let the cows roam in the fields, feigned sickness, or appeared dull-witted when asked to perform a task, it was because they knew that their labor would benefit no one but their owner. The rewards for work were totally different for the white man and the slave. For the white man, labor had its financial rewards; for the black man, it only served to remind him that he was being used to enrich another.
Solomon Northup told of his ritual working in the fields:
“The hands are required to be in the cotton fields as soon as it is light in the morning, and, with the exception of ten or fifteen minutes, which is given them at noon to swallow their allowance of cold bacon, they are not permitted to be a moment idle until it is too dark to see, and when the moon is full, they oftentimes labor till the middle of the night. They do not dare to stop even at dinner time, nor return to the quarters, however late it be, until the order to halt is given by the driver.”8
For my ancestors who toiled on plantations, work began at sunrise and ended late at night. Picking cotton and working in the sugar and rice fields were just a few of the grueling tasks given to them. The following is from part of an overseer’s or slaveholder’s diary from the Falconer plantation of Wayne County, Mississippi, chronicling work performed by the enslaved. Falconer appears to be a more “lenient” slaveholder. Slaves were given four days off for Christmas and three other days off during the year.
Stolen Childhood
The age of maturity came early for black children. By age ten (some former slaves say even younger) they were on their way to a life of servitude. Many of the enslaved remember following their parents into the fields or the big house, where they got their first introduction to slave labor. At first the work seemed innocent, but soon the reality set in. Picking up trash turned into picking dirt out of cotton bolls. Cutting threads turned into hours of weaving clothes. Shelling peas turned into planting acres of vegetables; feeding the mules turned into plowing the land.
Enslaved parents knew all too well what awaited their young; they knew the world of child’s play would come quickly to an end. My people tried to make their children’s early years as joyful as possible. There were berries for the children to pick and songs to sing. There were tales of Br’er Rabbit and ghost stories to learn. There were marbles and jump rope and tag to play. There were “aunts” and “grandmothers,” whose aprons could hide and shield them from parental scolding. There were fathers and other black men to delight them with magic and music and dance. And there were times when my ancestors played with the masters’ children—even beat them at games—and no one minded or abruptly changed the rules so that slaves could not win.
Many enslaved children were sold or given as gifts—passed lovingly from one generation of slaveholders to the next. This letter from Edward Wortham of Granville County, North Carolina, is a receipt of sale to Thomas P. Wortham for one cent. (See full transcription shown here.)
But the rules would change. White playmates would become slaveholders, black children would become slaves. Life’s lessons came in many ways. They came from black parents who taught their children to mind their manners, to speak only when spoken to, to keep secret the talk spoken in the slave quarters. These were lessons in survival, as black parents knew that a slip of the tongue could reveal a plan of escape or result in a quick slap from any white person who thought the child was being impudent. They came from the everyday inequities black children saw in life—inequities that ruled that only white people got respect, only white children went to school, and only white people could come and go as they pleased.
Many times the lessons came from former white playmates who, with pride, assumed the role of young slaveholder, reminding my people that they could be bought and sold at the drop of a hat. But most often, slavery’s lessons came in direct ways—from the first bite of the lash that cut into my ancestors’ young backs, from the wild look in a runaway’s eyes as he was captured and brought back for punishment, from the cry of a black mother as another child was separated from her and sold.
But my people never passively accepted their slave condition. Even the children, sensing the inherent wrong of slavery, acted out in rebellion. Not yet fully accepting their roles as slaves, black youth rebelled against the world that refused to treat them as human. There were the children among those Africans who successfully staged a revolt aboard the slave ship Amistad. And there were the countless young slaves who ran off to Union camps, preferring to face the bayonets and gun blasts of war than the whippings and indignities of slavery.
Once in the fields, children were expected to work along with the adults, picking up to a hundred pounds a day. John Walson, an old slave, recalls: “I had to do field work…Even us kids had to pick a hunnert and fifty pounds of cotton a day, or we got a whoopin’…Durin’ de cotton hoein’ time, de overseer wanted all of us—dat is, de biggest ones—to stay right in line and chop along. We had to keep up wid one another. And if we didn’t, we jes’ got de bullwhoop. De overseer would ride up and hit us over de back, if we didn’t do our job right.”9
Black children must have sensed early in life that the world was against them. Born to mothers often too weary to play, living in want of the midst of plenty, learning that black men were powerless to protect them, black youth must have found the world a cruel, frightening, and unfair place. Slavery taught them a lifelong lesson: the world made a distinction between white and black; it favored the former and despised the latter. For my people, childhood had an early end. The real world awaited them, beckoning them to the stretches of fields that awaited their nimble fingers and to slaveholders, young and old, waiting to be served.
Two former enslaved children, date unknown.
A newspaper clipping about Charity, a young slave girl who admitted to poisoning the slaveholding family by putting arsenic in their coffee pot.
To Make a Slave
How does one become a slave? What is the process that turns a human being into a creature of self-hatred and self-doubt, someone fully controlled and in fearful awe of another? Slaveholders developed a system. It was called “seasoning.” It was the process under which strong men and women were broken, stripped of their dignity, and tortured. Seasoning was a brutal system—a system that remade men in an image pleasing to their oppressor. It rewarded “good” behavior and punished “bad” behavior. It turned captive men into things, their captors into beasts.
The wise slave master never took seriously the belief that my people were natural-born slaves. He knew that African men and women, fresh from the Continent, had to be broken in, forced to accept a subservient position. The enslaved could never be trusted fully; men wanted to be free. If slavery were to work, if strong men and succeeding generations were to wear the yoke of bondage, their psychology would have to be altered. They would have to be made to believe that they were innately inferior and accept slavery as their natural condition. The seasoning process was neither quick nor easy. It took months, years, generations to break my people’s spirit. Slaveholders knew the process was essential; without it the slaveholding regime would fall.
The seasoning began shortly after the arrival of a new shipload of enslaved Africans. Most planters selected trusted slaves, those who had already been successfully conditioned, to train the new arrivals. Seasoned slaves taught the novices the rudiments of plantation life and how to survive in the cruel new world. They taught them to communicate, to use the tools, to greet white men with lowered eyes. They taught them their new names and made sure they understood the new culture and its values. They soothed new arrivals, shielded them as best they could from violent overseers, and tried to explain how they would never again be free, never again return to the country of their birth. They convinced the novices that compliance was in their best interest, that rebellion would result in death.
Africans mutilated by the bullwhip carried the scars for life. Gordon, an escaped slave who later served as a Union soldier, showed the scars that resulted from a whipping administered in 1862 around Christmas.
James Ball, a slave in South Carolina, describes the whip used on the plantation: “The lash is ten feet long, made of small strips of buckskin, tanned so as to be dry and hard, and plaited carefully and closely together, of a thickness, in the largest part, of a man’s little finger… At the farthest end of his thong is attached a cracker, nine inches in length, made of strong sewing silk, twisted and knotted, until it feels as firm as hardest twine. Once felt on the bare flesh, the burning sting of the whip could never be forgotten.”10
Historian Kenneth M. Stampp, author of The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South, outlined the steps11 most often used by slaveholders to maintain fear and control.
1. Establish and maintain strict discipline.
2. Implant in the slave a consciousness of personal inferiority.
3. Awe the bondsman with a sense of the master’s enormous power.
4. Persuade the slave to take an interest in the master’s enterprise and to accept his standards of good conduct.
5. Impress in the slave his utter sense of helplessness to create a habit of perfect dependence.
When the psychological torture had altered one’s behavior, when the slave feared more for his or her own survival than the survival of the group, the seasoning process was complete.
New arrivals were not the only ones to undergo this conditioning. Each generation underwent a series of psychological and physical tortures to make them stand in fear. The plantation was a closed system, the overseer and master the ultimate authority. If a slave denied this, the overseer could withhold food. If the slave fought back, the slaveholder could sell the slave or a loved one. For refusing an order, the rebellious slave could be hung by the thumbs, beaten with a paddle, or left to blister in the burning sun. My people were whipped for leaving the plantation without a pass, shut up in a “nigger box” for lying or stealing, castrated if accused of violating a white woman, mutilated and chained for running away, hung for killing a white man, even if it was in self-defense. They were branded, burned, choked, bound, covered with molasses to attract biting insects, and decapitated. Their heads were stuck on posts along well-traveled routes. Such acts were done to reinforce the slaveholder’s claim of being all-powerful, to convince my people to submit, and to force them to accept his code of ethics and conduct.
It is difficult to express in words the horrors that my people endured during the seasoning process. Some argue that the tales of brutality are exaggerated, that most slaveholders treated their slaves kindly, reverting to the whip and brute force only when necessary. But slave narratives tell a different story. Even if individuals were spared the whip, they heard about or saw others who received it unmercifully, or they themselves were punished in other ways. “No man,” stated former slave Austin Stewart, “could possibly escape being punished—care not how attentive they might be, nor how industrious—punished they must be and punished they were.” 12
Such was the law of the plantation. Such was the making of a slave.
Shackles used to tether the enslaved on display at the International Slavery Museum on February 9, 2012, in Liverpool, England.
Masters of Their Own Fate
They called it drapetomania: the disease of the mind that caused Negroes to run away. Slaveholders found it difficult to imagine why my ancestors fled. They were sure the slave’s desire for freedom was linked to a mental imbalance. In the eyes of many masters, my people enjoyed the “ideal” life—free food, lodging, medical care, clothing, and someone to look after their needs from cradle to grave. In truth, those enslaved were neither happy nor content. Runaways awakened slaveholders to a new reality. My people did not want something free; what they wanted was freedom.
Although all acts of rebellion raised the ire of sellers, buyers, and slave owners, runaways—those who openly confronted the plantation order—angered slaveholders the most. A fugitive slave interrupted work, cost slaveholders time and money, and challenged their master’s authority. Slaveholders took the news of a runaway as a personal affront. They would spare no expense to have the fugitive returned and would hold back no punishment to show others the price for daring to be free.
Runaway notices told much about my people, describing them in detail: “Yarrow, man of Guiney country, about six-feet high, has country marks down each side of his face…” or “Matilda, a young mulatto, branded on the right breast with the letters NB, had with her a small child when she ran.”
They told why the fugitive slaves ran and where they might go: “has family on nearby plantation, is expected to go there,” “absconded after a recent beating,” “fled fearing she was to be sold again.”
The notices also told how slavery had broken my people physically and psychologically: “much scarred about the neck and back,” “walks with drooping shoulders,” “has downcast look,” or “stammers so badly one can hardly understand him.” They told of the slaveholder’s determination to retrieve my people: “Reward of twenty shillings, “$50 paid to whomever returns him,” and even “wanted dead—with his head separated from his body.”
An engraving of a male slave fleeing from two caucasian men during a “slave hunt,” mid-19th century.
To run was not an easy decision. It meant leaving family and friends. It meant living in caves, holes, or the woods, hiding by day, traveling by night. It meant hiding from “nigger dogs” trained to catch and maul the enslaved, and from “patterollers,” usually lower-class whites who acted as slave patrollers, joyously undertaking their role of hunting down fugitive slaves. If caught, my people knew it meant sure punishment—whipping, mutilation, chains, starvation, cuffing in irons, isolation in a cell, or even punishment for the rest of the community, including family and friends whom the slaveholder was convinced had knowledge of the runaway’s escape or hideout.
But there were those who ran and made it to freedom, despite the odds. Many fled via the Underground Railroad, a network of secret hideouts where sympathetic people, both black and white, offered runaways shelter, food, and solace. The most famous of the Railroad’s “conductors” was Harriet Tubman, who returned to the South more than fifteen times, freeing an estimated three hundred people and outwitting bounty hunters who sought reward for her capture. Some escapees had ingenious plans, like Ellen and William Craft, who escaped because Ellen—whose color was nearly white—passed herself off as an invalid gentleman and William as “his” slave. Or there was Henry “Box” Brown, who escaped from Virginia to Philadelphia by traveling twenty-six hours concealed in a wooden crate. Some attempts were organized, like Gabriel Prosser’s rebellion in Virginia in 1800, Denmark Vesey’s attempt in Charleston in 1822, or the Reverend Nat Turner’s 1831 revolt in Virginia, in which nearly sixty whites were slain before Turner was caught and hung. There were those who rebelled in small ways, like setting fire to the plantation, killing the overseer, or putting shredded glass in the master’s food, ensuring a slow, painful death.
This 19th-century map of the United States illustrates the Underground Railroad showing in red the routes taken by fugitive slaves toward freedom in Canada and the free states of the United States.
A portrait of Harriet Tubman, known as the “Moses of Her People,” when she was around 50 years old. Tubman, previously enslaved, escaped and helped hundreds of slaves escape the South by means of the Underground Railroad.
The Reverend James W. C. Pennington, a fugitive slave, expressed the difficulty of his decision to flee. Two accounts stood in his way—he had a mother, father, and six brothers and sisters on the plantation for whose safety he feared, and he lacked total knowledge of direction or distance to Pennsylvania, the nearest free state. He wrote: “I had many cases in my mind’s eye of slaves of other planters who had failed, and who had been made examples of the most cruel treatment, by flogging and selling to the far South.…I was not without serious apprehension that such would be my fate. But the hour was now come, and the man must act and be free, or remain a slave forever. How the impression came to be upon my mind I cannot tell; but there was a strange and horrifying belief that, if I did not meet the crisis that day, I should be self-doomed—that my ear would be nailed to the doorpost forever.”13
Slaveholders learned firsthand or through the mistakes of others that a master could never trust any slave, that no white man ever knew what went on in a slave’s mind or heart. Slaves who seemed content were just as apt to flee as the sullen; the artisan as ready to abscond as the field hand. Even if a slave did not experience freedom, he or she saw others enjoying it and knew liberty was the preferred condition.
Hundreds of runaway slave notices appeared in newspapers across the South, alerting citizens of rewards for fugitive slaves. In Donaldson, Louisiana, where the townspeople spoke French and English, notices appeared in both languages so all residents could assist in the captures.
Frederick Douglass stated clearly what many slaveholders failed or refused to understand: “Give (a slave) a bad master and he aspires to a good master; give him a good master, and he wishes to become his own master.”14 Runaways clearly showed that they would rather die trying to be the masters of their own fate, than to live life as a slave.
A group of escaped slaves outside a cabin, at Cumberland Landing, Virginia, in 1861. Escaped slaves were known as contrabands after the Union General Benjamin Butler (1818–93) announced that any slaves in land controlled by the Union Army would be regarded as contraband property.
Living in the Balance
Not all black people in America were born into slavery, nor did all spend their entire lives in bondage. These were the quasi-free, those who walked the precarious balance between slavery and freedom. They were black men and women who were born of free mothers, who were manumitted (freed from bondage) by slaveholders, who purchased their freedom, and who “took” it. Whether enslaved or free, my people still faced discrimination and felt the hatred shown to all blacks. To white America, free black men and women were a scourge and a menace. “Freedmen,” as they were called, were harassed, pursued, insulted, jailed, attacked, captured, kidnapped, and sold back into slavery. If this was freedom, few could tell.
State laws made it difficult for my people to become free and difficult to then enjoy that freedom. Some states made it illegal for slaveholders to manumit their slaves, keeping in perpetual bondage those whom masters wished to free. Other laws required free blacks to leave the state and their families and friends behind. Other laws required free blacks to leave the state and to have a white guardian who could vouch for their freedom and conduct business for them. Southern laws ruled that all freed blacks were required to carry passes. Even these were no guarantee that they could move about freely, as often passes were confiscated or destroyed and the bearer re-enslaved.
Freedom in the North was little better. In some states, black men could not vote, could not serve on juries, could not hold church services unless a respected white minister was present, could not possess firearms. They were barred from certain trades, required to have licenses for others, and faced discrimination in hiring, housing, and education. Free blacks often were met with open hostility. In 1829 a band of citizens in Cincinnati, Ohio, ran out of town freedmen who could not post a required bond. More than a thousand black men and women were forced to look for residence elsewhere. In New York, there were riots in Utica and New York City, in 1834 and 1839. In Philadelphia, whites marched into the black section of town, burned homes, attacked innocent black people, and ransacked churches. In Ohio, German residents so objected to emancipated slaves moving there that their white guardians had to take the free people to another state.
Robert Green of Missouri was set free by his last slaveholder, Frederick Dent. Torn and tattered, his manumission papers were all that ensured Green’s ability to move about. (See full transcription shown here.)
Shunned, humiliated, and ignored, free black men and women in the North grew bitter at the treatment they received. “‘What stone,’ cried New York Negroes in 1860, ‘has been left unturned to degrade us? What hand has refused to fan the flame of popular prejudice against us? What American artist has not caricatured us? What wit has not laughed at our wretchedness? What songster has not made merry over our depressed spirits? What press had not ridiculed and condemned us? Few, few, very few.’”15
Life for the quasi-free black people was full of ironies. Granted, they were better off than those in bondage, but still they were denied the fruit of their labors, the freedom granted to others in the Constitution. Theirs was a life of endless struggle—a struggle for respect, a struggle for jobs, a struggle to build communities, a struggle for equal treatment. My ancestors walked tall but always under the threat of being cut down. They spoke boldly but not without ramifications. They defended their rights, but always in the face of death.
For my people, there was no rest. America was the land of the white man, and that was a fact that no black man—no matter how hard he suffered, no matter how “free” he had become—was ever allowed to forget.
Many free men and women worked and saved to purchase their loved ones. In the letter above, Amy Dorsey “received” her freedom in 1828 when manumitted by William Johnson. (See full transcription shown here.)
In 1787, Josiah Wedgwood created this powerful image of an enslaved African—shackled and kneeling—imploring men to end slavery.
Faith of the Fathers
Surely you must wonder, how did my people survive? With the world against them, the days dark and dreary, how did they believe and keep hope alive? There is no way to explain their fortitude, except to say it was faith in God, in their God, in a God who heard their prayers and, as with the children of Israel, promised them deliverance. It was faith that carried them over the troubled Atlantic, faith that made them cling to hope as they stood on the auction block, faith that led them to believe that trouble did not last forever.
Religion and spirituals have always been crucial to African people. It was the way my ancestors sought to explain the unknown and to appeal to powers greater than man. Africans acknowledged a supreme being; they petitioned the ancestors and lesser deities for the blessings upon the community. In African communities, there were deities associated with nature—gods of the earth that governed fertility and punished men by sending famine and virulent diseases; deities of the sky—gods of thunder, lightning, and rain; and water divinities that dwelled in the rivers, lakes, and sea. Africans saw the spirit of the supreme in all things: in the rocks, the trees, and the animals. They had priests and priestesses who oversaw rituals and dictated proper sacrifices, herbal men and women who cured illnesses, and wise elders who kept peace within the community.
But the Europeans saw the black man’s worship as heathen and sought not only to enslave Africans but to “bring them religion.” The Europeans believed it was their duty to “Christianize.” They taught my people their interpretation of Christianity—that suffering on Earth would lead to reward in heaven, that the way to please God was to please the master, that slavery was ordained by God. Slaveholders forbade Africans to call on our gods—Oshun, Shango, Chukwu, and Olorun—and outlawed the drums that called my people together and infused them with the courage and spirit to fight.
The slave master read the Bible to his human “chattel,” picking out passages that supported his point of view. Later, he would train one of the slaves to preach the same message and stood in service to make sure that the African did. It soon became clear to the enslaved that the slaveholders taught a religion that they rarely practiced. The slaveholder who bowed piously Sunday morning would not hesitate to beat his slave Sunday evening. Those who felt the Sabbath was holy waited until Monday to apply the “well-deserved” stripes.
Faith in a better day was expressed through “spirituals” that carried coded messages of hope, freedom, or plans of escape. This engraving by Kemble, captioned “Spiritual singer in a Negro settlement,” is from 1888–9.
Africans fixed up the religion they were taught on the plantation—changed it to serve their needs. Religion did more than help my people endure; it told them to resist. It was a sign from God that the Reverend Nat Turner said he saw that directed him to rise and kill his master and others. And it was the name “Moses” that Harriet Tubman was called while leading her people to freedom. When my people sang “I’m Bound for Canaan,” they were bound for the North and when they sang “Go Down, Moses,” they were sending out a message that it would not be long before slavery would fall.
Not all of Africa was left on the shores. Many, especially the first and second generations of enslaved Africans, remembered and carried out African rituals in the New World. Charles Ball, in the narrative of his life under slavery, recounted a slave funeral at which he assisted: “I assisted her and her husband to inter the infant…and its father buried with it, a small bowl and several arrows; a little bag of parched meal; a miniature canoe, about a foot long, and a little paddle (with which he said it would cross the ocean to his own country); a small stick, with an iron nail, sharpened and fastened into one end of it; and a piece of white muslin, with several curious and strange figures painted on it in blue and red, by which, he said, his relations and countrymen would know the infant to be his son, and would receive it accordingly, on its arrival amongst them.… He cut a lock of hair from his head, threw it upon the dead infant, and closed the grave with his own hands. He then told us the God of his country was looking at him, and was pleased with what he had done.”16
Their prayers went up and their songs went out to a god they believed listened and cared. My ancestors’ songs told of the promised land, one up North in the land of freedom. They told of the Israelites at the Red Sea and of the Hebrew children in the fiery furnace—and how God delivered them. They rose every morning, praying and believing in a better day, and they worked in the fields singing of freedom, and they laid their weary bodies down at the end of the evening, thanking God for sparing their lives, and those of their friends and loved ones.
When one looks at how my people made it over, undoubtedly it was the God of their ancestors who brought them through. When no one else heard their cry, God did. When no one else knew their sorrow, God did. So they walked, tarried, fought, and prayed on, believing that if God delivered Daniel, surely he would deliver them.
Spirituals revealed my people’s sorrows and their hopes. They were born from the stories in the Bible and in the struggles of everyday life. So my people sang.
Fighting on Two Fronts
There were none more ready to fight during the Civil War than my people. They reasoned that if the country was going to war over the issue of slavery, then they—slaves, black men free from birth, and former slaves—should join the battle. They soon found that no one—from the common Northerner, to War Department officials, to the President of the United States—wanted to see a black man in a Union uniform. “This is the White man’s war,” one official declared. They wanted the black man to stay out of it.
Yet the black man could not stay out of the war, not if the Union wanted to win. The quick, easy victory the North predicted did not come to fruition. In August 1862, bowing to pressure, President Abraham Lincoln authorized Congress to muster free blacks into war on a limited basis. On January 1, 1863, the president signed the Emancipation Proclamation. The document freed all slaves living in the rebellious states. More importantly in the eyes of the president, it cleared the way for states to enlist black men into the Union’s armed services.
Proudly, the black man donned the Union blue, but he soon learned that he was fighting two fronts: one against the Confederate army that fought to keep him enslaved, the other against his fellow Union soldiers, who viewed him as inferior—too cowardly and dull-witted for the battlefield. Instead of being trained for battle, black soldiers were relegated to menial tasks—building bridges, digging ditches, weighing and rationing food, and burying the dead. They often were given spoiled food, inferior uniforms, and old weapons, and they received less training in drill and military maneuvers. Black soldiers, even noncommissioned officers, received less than half the pay of white field soldiers. It took two Congressional acts, passed just months before the end of the war, to ensure that all black soldiers received the pay due them from the day of their enlistment.
This document tells of the difficulties one Confederate officer had in “getting up Negroes” on account of the loud firing heard by many blacks during a battle. The officer writes that he would proceed to Fort Pillow, Tennessee, with one hundred hands, if so ordered. Ironically, Fort Pillow—built in part by slave labor—would become a death camp for more than 200 black Union soldiers. As they surrendered, the black soldiers were heinously slaughtered by Confederates. (See full transcription shown here.)
Despite the discrimination, men of the United States Colored Troops fought with pride. They won the respect of the War Department at the battle of Port Hudson, where more than 200 black soldiers lost their lives in the Union’s ill-fated attempt to take the Confederate stronghold. Few questioned black soldiers’ bravery after the battle at Milliken’s Bend, where nearly half of the 300 men of the 9th Louisiana Infantry of African Descent died defending that federal post against a surprise Confederate attack. They silenced their critics after the Massachusetts 54th led the charge on Fort Wagner. Greatly outnumbered and fatigued from days without food or rest, the men fought valiantly, losing 247 men, more than any other unit engaged in the assault.
The Confederates began using enslaved and free blacks on the battlefield at the first sign of war. In many cases, free men and enslaved Africans were impressed into service and forced to build forts, dig entrenchments, and even to serve as substitutes for whites dodging the draft or wounded in battle.
In all, almost 200,000 black men fought in the Civil War, on land and on sea. Almost two dozen received the Congressional Medal of Honor. Black men participated in 449 engagements, 39 of which were major battles. Approximately 37,000 died in battle—35 percent more than white regiments involved in the same conflicts; another 3,500 died of wounds or disease. None again dared to question the black man’s readiness to fight for his own freedom. He had proven his willingness to serve with his life.
I’ve often wondered if my ancestors ever felt that their fighting was in vain—whether they grew weary of proving their worth in a world where all seemed against them. Why they fought may be summarized in the words of one recruit who joined the Union. In examining the applicant, Colonel Thomas Morgan cautioned him that he might lose his life. The black recruit indicated that he understood this, and then proudly responded, “but my people will be free.”
Lithograph cover illustration of sheet music to “Hymn of the Freedman,” depicting black soldiers of the Union, 8th U.S. Colored Troops and their commanding officer, Colonel Charles W. Fribley, killed in the Battle of Oulustee, Florida, in 1864.
The Day of Jubilee
They called it “Jubilee,” the day that freedom came. It came after almost 150 years of cruel bondage in America and deaf ears refusing to hear my people’s cries. It came after millions had died in chains, and tens of thousands had perished on the battlefield. It came after the advancement of Union troops and the defeat of Confederate regiments. But to most, at least in spirit and in principle, it came with the Emancipation Proclamation, the presidential edict that declared my people henceforth and forever free.
News of President Lincoln’s plan to free the slaves traveled quickly among my people. It sped along the plantation grapevine, through conversations overheard in the big house and carried to the slave quarters. My people received the news cautiously, wondering if the president would go through with his plan. But Lincoln was determined. Slavery had divided the nation and cost millions of lives.
On January 1, 1863, President Lincoln legally ended slavery by declaring free “all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States.” In the Emancipation Proclamation he named the states and portions of states that were still in rebellion and declared those in bondage free.
Nothing could match the euphoria, witnesses tell, of the day that the president signed the Emancipation Proclamation. In the nation’s capital, my people filled the streets, the town halls, the African churches, praying, praising, and thanking God that they had lived to see this long-awaited day. Old women sang and testified. Old men openly wept. At Port Royal, South Carolina, freedmen came from miles around to attend Jubilee celebrations, complete with a parade, speeches, and feasts, and to cheer the First South Carolina Colored Volunteers. The crowd was deeply touched when at first an old man, and then several black men and women sang, “My country ‘tis of thee, sweet land of liberty,” capturing the sacred mood of the day in a way no speeches could.
Shortly after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect on January 1, 1863, many enslaved persons escaped to Union lines at Newbern, North Carolina. Wood engraving with modern color, February 1863.
But as great as the edict was, the Emancipation Proclamation was far from perfect. First, the president declared free those enslaved in the states and territories in rebellion—states where he had no authority—and left in bondage nearly half a million of my people enslaved in states where he had authority—border states, and the portions of Tennessee, Louisiana, and Virginia under Union control. Second, since slaveholders were not about to let their bondsmen walk off merely because the North’s president had declared them free, freedom would come when and if the Union defeated the South or if the enslaved escaped behind Union lines. Third, if people were waiting for the Emancipation to strike a moral chord against slavery, they were disappointed. Twice the president mentioned that the action was taken as a “necessary war measure for suppressing the rebellion.”
Slavery ended but not slavelike working conditions that free men and women were forced to accept. Without land, food, shelter, money, or clothing, many former slaves were forced to remain on the plantation. Jubilation was short-lived for many.
Still, with all of its shortcomings, my people greeted it as a long-awaited godsend. It may not have been all that learned men hoped for, but it was more than the common slave ever dreamed. In services that lasted from New Year’s Eve to the dawn of the day of Emancipation, an old man rose and told the rejoicing crowd, “Onst the time was, dat I cried all night…De nex morning my child was to be sold, an she was sold, and I neber spec to see her no more till de day hob judgment. Now no mo dat! No mo dat! Bress the Lord, now, we’s free!”17
On April 9, 1865, the Civil War ended, yet the issue of freedom and equality for the black man would continue to divide the nation. What freedom was like and what it would bring my people was not yet known. But they knew slavery’s chains had been broken. From the cotton plantations of the deep south to the rice fields of the coastal states, there rose a freedom song: “No more driver’s lash for me, no more, no more. No more diver’s lash for me, Many Thousands Gone.”
The first page of the Emancipation Proclamation, issued January 1, 1863. (See full transcription shown here.)