2.
A “Troublesome Property”
The reason for enslaved people’s resistance was slavery. Enslavers, whether kind or mean, quickly learned that bondage bred defiance. In 1794, President George Washington wrote that he expected people held in bondage “to be a very troublesome species of property.”
In 1750, a quarter of a million people in British America were enslaved, and by the time of the Declaration of Independence the number had doubled. Slavery gradually disappeared in the North after the Revolution. But it remained a part of life in the South, and by 1860, fourteen states held four million Africans in chains.
Frederick Douglass escaped slavery at twenty-one. His written and spoken words perceptively analyzed the system’s evils. In one speech he described the condition of bondage: “The law gives the master absolute power over the slave. He may work him, flog him, hire him out, sell him, and in certain instances, kill him, with perfect immunity. The slave is a human being divested of all rights—reduced to the level of a brute—a mere ‘chattel’ in the eye of the law—placed beyond the circle of human brotherhood—cut off from his kind—his name . . . inserted in a master’s ledger, with horses, sheep, and swine. In law, the slave has no wife, no children, no country, and no home. He can own nothing, possess nothing, acquire nothing.”
In 1860, Thomas Drayton of Hilton Head, South Carolina, armed more than one hundred enslaved people. Some are shown in this photograph after their liberation by the US Army-Navy.
In 1860, three hundred fifty thousand white families held people in bondage, and many other southern whites had an economic stake in bondage, or thought they did. African Americans raised 90 percent of all cotton, an even larger percentage of Virginia’s tobacco, and almost all of Kentucky’s hemp, Louisiana’s sugar, and Carolina’s rice. Crops raised by enslaved workers provided the South’s wealth, were its leading exports, and insured its economic growth. Ownership of enslaved people was the largest single economic interest in the United States.
The men and women invested in owning other humans, especially the richest three thousand, dominated southern life. “The slaveholders are the South,” wrote Douglass. “They are the only active power there. They rule the states entirely and tolerate no policy which in the least degree endangers their power.” He said that the eight million whites who owned no one were “freight cars attached to a slaveholder locomotive. Where the locomotives go, the train must follow.”
In the North, tax money built libraries and public schools. In the South, it built jails to hold people in bondage and paid the salaries of patrols hunting for enslaved people. New York State published more newspapers than the fourteen states with legalized slavery combined. “There is no legislation except for the benefit of slavery and slaveholders” in the South, wrote Hinton Helper. A North Carolinian who did not enslave people, Helper blamed the South’s economic and educational problems on slavery.
At first, some enslavers were tormented over their ownership of human property. Patriot Patrick Henry said: “Every thinking honest man rejects slavery in Speculation, how few in practice? Would anyone believe that I am Master of slaves of my own purchase? I am drawn along by the general inconvenience of living without them; I will not, I cannot justify it.”
Then the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 made slavery a high-profit business. By quickly cleaning cotton of its seeds, the gin reduced the price of cotton. Enslaved people who once spent days picking out cotton seeds by hand were sent into the fields. The price of cotton fell and demand for it increased. Profits soared.
Planters who originally justified slavery as “economically necessary” now happily called it “a positive good.” They claimed it was beneficial to white and Black. Some began to argue that enslaved people were better treated than free workers and that perhaps slavery would be a good way to handle lower-class white labor.
Conditions for enslaved people varied widely from one plantation or enslaver to another, but generally they were harsh. In the drive to maximize profits, enslavers showed little concern for human health and safety. The cost of feeding a field hand on a plantation of a hundred or more was about $7.50 a year. In the Georgia Sea Islands standard plantation allotments were a peck of corn, a pound of salt pork or beef every week or two, vegetables in season, a little salt, and molasses. Clothing was a crude cloth outfit issued in the spring and another in the fall. Shoes were handed out once a year, a blanket every three years. Boys and girls younger than thirteen were not given clothing. Enslaved families lived in crude huts.
Contempt for life was built into a system whose goal was to secure the largest profit possible from a people who had no rights. In 1809, a South Carolina court ruled that “young slaves . . . stand on the same footing as other animals.” In 1844, Senator John Hammond wrote of two of his workers who had died: “Neither a serious loss. One valuable mule also died.” Enslaved people were sold at auction, won in lotteries, lost at cards, or handed out as presents at birthdays, weddings, and Christmas parties.
Slavery reduced human beings to chattel or property, as in this notice of a raffle.
Enslavers came to believe their race was born to rule, and those they enslaved were an inferior breed. Racial contempt led to cruelty. A Louisiana woman said: “I was once whipped because I said to missus, ‘My mother sent me.’ We were not allowed to call our mammies ‘mother.’ It made it come too near the way of the white folks.”
Roberta Manson recalled: “They said we had no souls, that we were animals.” She remembered her father was whipped “because he looked at a slave they killed, and cried.” In 1854, a British official visiting South Carolina reported: “It is literally no more to kill a slave than to shoot a dog.”
To insure a smooth working system, whites set about convincing Africans to obey their every command. Control of enslaved people’s minds rested on denying them all knowledge of the world and constantly stressing that they were born inferior. “We knowed jess what they told us and no more,” remembered William Johnson. Whites considered stupidity among enslaved people “a high virtue,” said one enslaved person who fled to freedom. Edward Taylor recalled: “I thought white folks made the stars, sun, and everything on earth. I knowed nothing but to be driven and beat all the time.”
The entire system was based on distortions and lies about race. Trusted enslaved workers helped run plantations, kept records, and created useful inventions—but Africans were called an inferior breed. British journalist William Howard Russell found contradictions on a Louisiana sugar plantation. “The first place I visited with the overseer was a new sugar-house, which negro carpenters and masons were engaged in erecting. It would have been amusing, had not the subject been so grave, to hear the overseer’s praises of the intelligence and skill of these workmen, and his boast that they did all the work of skilled labourers on the estate, and then listen to him, in a few minutes . . . on the utter helplessness and ignorance of the black race, their incapacity to do any good, or even to take care of themselves.”
Planters liked to believe that African Americans, even those who carried out important responsibilities, were dependent on whites. Slaves without masters, planters thought, could not work for themselves. They would die without white managers. Ignored were the achievements of thousands of people formerly in bondage—even in the South—who became inventors, poets, teachers, ministers, or businesspeople. A woman who insisted that the enslaved men and women on her plantation “cannot take care of themselves,” admitted they did everything. “I never so much as washed out a pocket handkerchief with my own hands,” she remembered. Planters were dependent on the labor of enslaved people for their wealth and leisure.
Visitors to the South, such as Harriet Martineau, reported insensitivity to pain, “savage violence,” a rigidity of mind, and a “blunted moral sense . . . among the best whites.” New York Times reporter Frederick Olmsted found little regard in many southerners for “the sacredness of human life.” A Black child received her worst whipping for playing with a doll that belonged to her enslaver’s family. A hungry child was beaten for eating a biscuit.
Slavery as a form of violence encouraged more disorder. “Every natural and social feeling and affection are violated with indifference; slaves are treated as though they did not possess them,” wrote Sarah Grimké, daughter of an aristocratic South Carolina family. She and her sister Angelina left the South to become noted antislavery writers and lecturers in the North. The Grimké sisters found “the system of espionage . . . over slaves the most intolerable known.”
Men and women shared the burdens of slavery.
Planters made all the rules and faced no intervention from government or moral outrage from church. They could drive enslaved people as long as they wished. Edgar Fripp had his “work all night by the light of the full moon during some heavy periods.” Women worked as hard as men, one recalling, “I had to do everything dey was to do on de outside. Work in de field, chop wood, hoe corn. . . . I have done everything on a farm what a man done ’cept cut wheat. I splits rails like a man, I drive the gin, what was run by two mules.” On one plantation, workers complained they hardly had time to eat, “hardly time to get a little water.”
On large plantations owners handed control to overseers who acted as managers. Reporter Olmsted was told by an Alabamian that “a real devil of an overseer would get almost any wages he’d ask” and “if they made plenty of cotton, the owners never asked how many niggers they killed.” When Olmsted asked if enslaved people weren’t too valuable to abuse or kill, he was told, “Seems they don’t think so. They are always bragging—you must have heard them—how many bales their overseer has made. . . . They never think of anything else.”
Marriages between enslaved people were dependent upon the enslaver’s permission. Since enslavers did not accept Black marriages as binding, they refused to grant dignified weddings. They did not permit a minister or an exchange of vows; the loving couple simply jumped over a broomstick.
Enslavers liked to think of themselves as kindly ladies and gentlemen converting childlike, ignorant heathens into civilized, Christian workers. “We never thought of them as slaves; they were ‘ours,’ our own dear black folks,” said a Florida woman.
“They joyed with us and sorrowed with us; they wept when we wept, and laughed when we laughed. Often our best friends, they were rarely our worst enemies,” recalled a Richmond woman.
People in bondage had little choice but to follow their enslavers’ demands and to live with their insulting attitudes. Once out of the enslaver’s reach, men and women showed they had not been fooled. Jarmain Loguen fled bondage, wrote a book, became a noted New York minister and leading abolitionist voice. One day his old mistress wrote and angrily asked him for $1,000 for running away. She argued, “We raised you as we did our own children.” The Reverend Mr. Loguen replied, “Woman, did you raise your own children for the market? Did you raise them for the whipping post? . . . Shame on you.”
Despite planters’ efforts at mind control, African Americans were guided by their own sense of dignity, morality, and community. William Craft’s former enslaver had a reputation of being a devout Christian, “but he thought nothing of selling my poor old father, and dear aged mother, at separate times, to different persons, to be dragged off never to behold each other again,” wrote Craft. He “also sold a dear brother and sister, in the same manner as he did my father and mother. The reason . . . ‘they were getting old, and would soon become valueless in the market.’ ”
For the African American community the breakup of families through sale or auction was one of the worst threats of life in bondage. Josiah Henson was about six when an auction divided his family. His mother, older brothers, and sisters were sold first. “Then I was offered to the assembled purchasers. My mother, half distracted with the thought of parting forever from all her children, pushed through the crowd, while the bidding for me was going on, to the spot where Riley [her owner] was standing. She fell at his feet and clung to his knees, entreating him in tones that a mother can only command, to buy her baby as well as herself, and spare to her one, at least, of her little ones.” Riley kicked and struck at her until she had to crawl away.
Once he escaped, Henson wrote a book of his experiences, helped other enslaved people escape, and became the model that novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe used for her lead character in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
“Slaves are taught ignorance as we teach our children knowledge,” recalled Leonard Black. They were not told their ages, and those near water were not allowed to learn to swim. They were told free states were ten thousand miles away, and that whites who called themselves abolitionists would eat them.
James W. C. Pennington received a doctorate degree from Heidelberg University in Germany, and in 1841 he wrote the first textbook history of African Americans. But, enslaved until he was twenty-one, he wrote, “I was as profoundly ignorant as a child of five years old.”
Finding that intelligence, knowledge, and talents might arouse suspicion or jealousy, enslaved people often played dumb. Lunsford Lane ran a profitable tobacco business, owned property, saved money, and “I never appeared to be so intelligent as I was.” Black people pretended to be meek, happy, and dumb. They learned to answer an enslaver’s questions with the words he wanted to hear. To fool whites, recalled Betty Jones of Virginia, people said, “Going to see Jenny tonight,” which meant there was going to be a dance.
Notice of a sale in 1852.
Henry Bibb concluded that “the only weapon of self-defense I could use successfully was that of deception.” African Americans developed deception to a high art. “Got one mind for the boss to see, got another for what I know is me,” went a song. A worker who laughed with his enslaver in the afternoon might plan to escape that evening.
Laborers became too ignorant to do a decent day’s work and too dense to understand or remember orders. “Under the cloak of great stupidity,” said a Virginia planter, enslaved people made “dupes” of whites. Plantation owners and overseers did not know when their hands were ill or just shamming, really physically disabled or just putting on a limp, a bent back, blindness, pregnancy.
In the evening among loved ones, souls were soothed with humor and faith to try to restore hope. People dreamed of, sang songs about, and prayed to God for deliverance. Solomon Northup, captured as a free man living in the North and held in bondage for twelve years, played his violin softly at midnight. “Had it not been for my beloved violin, I scarcely can conceive how I could have endured the long years of bondage.” His autobiography tells the story of his kidnapping and his final escape.
Around quiet campfires or in the privacy of their huts, the community gathered to swap tales of turtles that outdistanced hares, of little Davids who slew huge Goliaths, and of tiny animals that tricked lions and bears who wanted to eat them. People nourished morale with jokes about refusing to be buried near their enslavers because the devil might take the wrong body.
Delia, a North Carolina cook, secretly expressed her rage in the kitchen. “How many times I spit in the biscuits and peed in the coffee just to get back at them mean white folks.”
Enslaved people saw “good Christians” abusing their families and friends. Married white planters and their teenage sons slipped down to the workers’ quarter at night to find young women. The African American community expressed its shock at “the devilment in the big house” and at such hypocritical Christians.
The oppressed noted where the arms were stored, when patrols rode by, and when plantation owners and overseers went to sleep. The news was passed along to everyone in the community who could be trusted, and it mysteriously traveled through dense woods, over high mountains, and across wide rivers. Vice President John Adams was told by two French travelers who had visited the South, “The negroes have a wonderful art of communicating intelligence among themselves. It will run several hundred miles in a week or fortnight.”
“Our police regulations are very defective,” complained one enslaver. Plantation security was not defective. It was being tested at all hours by people whose aim in life was to be free.
Plantation owners, judges, and legislators often missed this point. A 1669 Virginia law referred to “the obstinacy” of Africans. In 1758, a Florida enslaver was shocked to learn those he held in bondage were part of a conspiracy to achieve freedom. He wrote: “Of what avail is kindness . . . when rewarded by such ingratitude.” In 1802, a South Carolina judge called African Americans “in general a headstrong, stubborn race of people.” And in 1859, a South Carolina committee complained of their “insolence . . . as a race.”
A people whose heritage was independence never surrendered their desire to return to their homeland or restore their original rights. Their women had special reasons for wanting to throw off their burdensome chains and return with their families to a life built on freedom.