by Taylor, Alan
Enslaved families also suffered from increasing sales to long-distance traders who served the voracious demand for slaves in the lower South. Before the revolution, Virginians sold few slaves beyond the boundaries of that colony. Between 1790 and 1810, however, at least 100,000 Virginia slaves moved south and west after sale to traders. The frequency and volume of interstate sales soared as cotton cultivation became profitable and widespread in the lower South. In 1803 a prime male field hand sold for about $600 in South Carolina, compared to $400 in Virginia: a $200 difference enticing to Virginia sellers and Carolina traders. The demand and the prices surged again in 1808, when the United States barred the import of slaves from Africa, a ban that rendered the lower South more dependent on Virginia for new slaves.93
John Randolph disdained the “base, hard-hearted masters” who sold “out of their families the negroes who had been raised among them,” but few Virginians dared to be soft-hearted given their debts. Most preferred to see slaves sold beyond their state rather than freed within their borders. Unlike long-distance sales, manumissions generated neither revenue nor, Virginians feared, greater protection from revolt, for the freed usually stayed close to their family and friends in Virginia. One legislator explained, “I am for opening every outlet to such a destructive species of population and for barring up every avenue by which it may return.”94
The sales divided enslaved families, separating children from parents and husbands from wives. William Grimes recalled, “It is not uncommon to hear mothers say, that they have half a dozen children, but the Lord only knows where they are.” He spoke from experience, for Grimes was only ten when sold away to a distant master: “It grieved me to see my mother’s tears at our separation. I was a heart-broken child . . . but I was compelled to go and leave her.” Old Dick sadly recalled losing all of his children by forced sale over the years: “It was a hard trial to part with my little ones, for I loved them like a father; but there was no help for it, and it was the case of thousands beside myself.” One historian calculates that forced migration and the domestic slave trade “destroyed about one-third of all first slave marriages in the Upper South” prior to 1840.95
“But I did not want to go and I jumped out of the Window.” In this engraving, Jesse Torrey, a critic of slavery, depicted a December 19, 1815, episode in Washington, D.C. Imprisoned in a garret by slave traders, the mother sought to escape by jumping out the window, but she suffered paralysis from her wounds. Rendered worthless to the traders, she remained behind, but they took away two of her children for sale to the Deep South. From A Portraiture of Domestic Slavery (1817). (Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society)
In 1815 slave traders locked up a mother and two children in the garret of a tavern in Washington, D.C., in preparation for driving them to Georgia. Named Anna, the mother tried to escape and return to her husband and other children, who had been left behind. Jumping out the window, she shattered her spine in the three-story fall. The slave trader left Anna’s worthless body behind but took away her children for sale in Georgia. A sympathizer mourned, “Thus her family was dispersed from north to south, and herself nearly torn in pieces, without the shadow of a hope of ever seeing or hearing from her children again!” The profits of masters and traders came at a high price paid by the enslaved.96
Wishful thinking asserted that the revolution’s changes benefited slaves by dispersing them in smaller numbers among owners who knew them better. James Madison claimed that the Virginians had become kinder, gentler, and more generous masters to their slaves: “They are better fed, better clad, better lodged, and better treated in every respect,” and “what was formerly deemed a moderate treatment, wd. now be a rigid one, and what formerly [was] a rigid one, would now be denounced by the Public feeling.” Madison credited that better treatment primarily to “the abolition of entails, & the rule of primogeniture.”97
In fact, dispersion through inheritance, sales, rental, and forced migration did little, if anything, to improve material conditions for the enslaved. On the issue that mattered most to the enslaved—the unity and security of their families—their conditions deteriorated after the revolution. In 1792, when restive slaves threatened to revolt in Northampton County, on the Eastern Shore, the governor, Henry Lee, investigated. He concluded that the unrest derived from the masters’ “practice of severing husband, wife, and children.”98
Thanks to the revolution, common Virginians found it easier to buy or rent slaves, and to move west and south to make new farms. But the enslaved suffered for the democratization and commercialization promoted by the revolution. As the planters sought to service their debts, satisfy multiple heirs, and rationalize their estates, they treated the enslaved as commodities and often ignored their family bonds. As a consequence, few Virginia slaves could sustain stable households for life. By 1800 in Virginia most enslaved husbands and wives lived on different farms, rendering single-parent households the rule rather than the exception. Consequently, when British warships returned to Chesapeake Bay, Tidewater slaves would seize the opportunity to reunite their families by helping the invaders. Despite the disappointments of the last war, the liberator king offered hope for the enslaved.99
Virginian Luxuries, by an unknown artist, ca. 1825. In this tavern sign, a New England artist presents sexual and physical abuse as the essence of slavery in Virginia. (Courtesy of the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation)
2
NIGHT AND DAY
Black people were not like white people, . . . black people worked in the night and white people in the day.
—PHIL, A SLAVE, KING AND QUEEN COUNTY, 18131
IN JULY 1807 James Carter recalled the devastation of his family by the accelerating sales of slaves in postrevolutionary Virginia. Carter and his siblings had grown up near Fredericksburg, where they worked as house servants for Mrs. Lucy Baylor Armistead, a widow. In 1800 she remarried, taking Landon Carter as her husband and bestowing his last name on her slaves. Their merger rendered redundant most of her house servants, so the new couple proceeded to sell off James Carter and his siblings, to the despair of their mother. His brother Henry passed to a cruel taskmaster with a harsh overseer, who killed the young slave with a hurled stone when he tried to run away. Henry left behind a wife and infant child. Next the masters sold Carter’s sister Nelly to a Fredericksburg merchant whose “Greatist Speculation is on human flesh.” Resold far away, she vanished from her family’s knowledge forever. Next the masters auctioned the youngest girl, Judy, in a tavern after displaying her to “Blood thirsty fellows.” James Carter recalled, “My Mother and myself begged Mr. Carter not to sell this child out of Fred[ericksbur]g. He gave his word and honour that he would not but as soon as we left them he sold the child to thes[e] fellows.” The family never heard from Judy again. At last, the masters sold James to a bank clerk in Alexandria, who resold him to a slave drover bound for the lower South.2
James Carter escaped from the slave drover and fled to Philadelphia, where he found an antislavery benefactor who helped Carter negotiate by letter with the Alexandria bank clerk, to whom ownership of the slave had reverted after his escape from the drover. In return for a hefty payment from his wages in Philadelphia, Carter obtained freedom and returned to Alexandria, where he supported his elderly mother. Although sixty-seven, Carter’s father could still work, so his owner refused the son’s offer of $100 for his father’s freedom. At great cost, James Carter could reunite only a fraction of his shattered family.3
Carter felt betrayed because his ancestors had long served the Baylor family and, as mulattos, probably shared blood with their masters or overseers. But those traditional ties made scant difference when Landon Carter and his new wife needed money more than so many house slaves. James complained that although his mother “and Mrs. Armistead has been brought up together from Little Girls, she has sufferd all my Mother’s children to be picked from her. My Mother’s Family has served the Family of Mrs. Armist
ead upwards of one Hundred and 30 years.” The postwar era ruptured the colonial bonds that, in some cases, had screened slaves from the full operation of market forces.4
Families
Some of the larger-scale planters tried to keep slave couples together, from a conviction that it improved morale and productivity. Married men worked steadier by day if they did not spend their nights traveling to visit or seek a wife on a distant farm. Thomas Jefferson instructed an overseer, “There is nothing I desire so much as that all the young people in the estate should intermarry with one another and stay at home. They are worth a great deal more in that case than when they have husbands and wives abroad.” Jefferson gave presents to couples who married within his enslaved community and tried by purchases to unite couples who had “imprudently” married outside of “his family.” But Jefferson also sold away any slaves who disappointed his expectations for obedience and work. For all of his “scruples about selling negroes,” Jefferson did so as routinely as he promoted marriages. When a slave became disruptive, Jefferson would “make an example . . . in terrorem to others” by pointedly selling him to a “quarter so distant as never more to be heard of among us.” Jefferson reasoned that a distant sale would impress the other slaves “as if he were put out of the way by death.” Jefferson maintained his workforce at about 200 slaves from 1784 to 1796 by selling (or giving to relatives) 161 slaves.5
Selling and keeping operated as alternating currents in a system of discipline. The same masters who tried to unite couples also deployed the threat of sale to coerce their slaves to obey and work. William Grimes recalled, “My old master and mistress in Virginia had often threatened to sell me to the negro buyer from Georgia, for any trifling offence, and in order to make me dislike to go there, they would tell me I should have to eat cotton seed and . . . not have corn bread to eat as I did in Virginia.” After catching a married man stealing wool, John Randolph reported, “I have punished the scoundrel exemplarily, and shall send him to Georgia or Louisiana at Christmas. He has a wife and three fine children.” Randolph kept the wife and children, who did not have a merry Christmas.6
Chesapeake region slaves dreaded sale far from relatives and friends. Josiah Henson remembered “threats of being sold to the far south” as “the greatest of all terrors to the Maryland slave.” In Norfolk, a visitor found that the slaves had “an invincible repugnance to being sold to the Southward,” and he heard their mournful work song:
Going away to Georgia, ho, heave, O!
Massa sell poor Negro, ho, heave, O!
Leave poor wife & children, ho, heave, O!
Although he owned slaves, George Tucker (a cousin of St. George Tucker) opposed their sale to the Deep South: “The sentence of banishment strikes them like the message of death. I have myself heard, with shuddering, their wild and frantic shrieks.”7
When confronted with suffering slaves, some masters showed a deft ability to evade blame by, instead, congratulating themselves for a superior ability to feel the pain of inferiors. St. George Tucker’s eldest son, Henry St. George Tucker, resided in Winchester in the Shenandoah Valley, where he practiced law. In 1804 the father sent to Henry a ten-year-old slave boy named Bob to work as a house servant. Bob felt devastated by the forced separation from his mother, as Henry reported to his own father:
Poor little fellow! I was much affected at an incident last night. I was waked from a very sound sleep by a most piteous lamentation. I found it was Bob. I called several times before he waked. “What is the matter, Bob?” “I was dreaming about my mammy Sir”!!! cried he in a melancholy & still distressed tone: “Gracious God!” thought I, “how ought not I to feel, who regarded this child as insensible when compared to those of our complexion.” . . . How finely woven, how delicately sensible must be those bonds of natural affection which equally adorn the civilized and savage—the American and African—nay the man and the brute.
Despite discovering a shared humanity with the boy, Henry reiterated a stark polarity in which he stood as the superior: the civilized, American man in contrast to the savage, African brute. In that view, slave labor supported, rather than contradicted, the freedom of those who most deserved it.8
Most masters regarded blacks as carnal creatures lacking in sentiment and sensibility, so they would readily forget old loves and easily find new ones in their new homes. “Their griefs are transient,” and their afflictions “are less felt, and sooner forgotten,” insisted Jefferson. In fact, slaves cherished their families and longed to preserve their unity in the present and across the generations. In July 1774 at Robert Carter’s Nomini Hall estate, an illiterate and elderly slave, Dadda Thomas Gumby, begged a favor from Philip Vickers Fithian, the Carter family tutor: to draw up a “List of his Children & their respective age.” In return, Gumby and his wife showered Fithian with gratitude: “Thank you, thank you, thank you Master, was the language of the old Grey-headed pair.” They did not own much, but they offered it all to Fithian: “Eggs, Apples, Potatoes, You shall have every thing we can get for you—Master!” Fithian demurred but Gumby persisted, for the tutor had done the greatest of favors for a slave who longed for a written record of his family in a bid to hold it together.9
The enslaved bitterly recalled the sale of a spouse as crueler than any beating. A woman declared, “Selling is worse than flogging. My husband was sold six years ago. My heart has bled ever since, and is not well yet. I have been flogged many times, since he was torn from me, but my back has healed in time.” Charles Ball remembered his heartache upon sale away from his wife and young children: “I awoke in agony and cursed my existence. . . . As we passed along the road, I saw the slaves at work in the corn and tobacco-fields. I knew they toiled hard and lacked food; but they were not, like me, dragged in chains from their wives, children and friends. Compared with me, they were the happiest of mortals.”10
Debt
The death of a master threatened enslaved families, for he (or she) almost always had many creditors and multiple heirs to satisfy. The heirs sold enough slaves to pay the debts and then divided up the rest. When the debts overwhelmed an estate, almost all of the slaves went on the auction block, and husbands and wives and their children usually passed to different and often distant owners. In 1824 the slaves at Monticello assured a visitor that “they were almost sure of not being torn away from [their families] to be transported elsewhere, so long as Mr. Jefferson lived.” Two years later he died, leaving massive debts. An auction divided his slaves among multiple buyers, who often ignored family bonds. Peter Fossett recalled his traumatic shock at age eleven to be “suddenly, at the death of Jefferson, put upon the auction block and sold to strangers.”11
In Campbell County, the Oxford Iron Works seemed to sustain the most fortunate of slave communities. The owner, David Ross, a Scotland-born entrepreneur, recognized and rewarded the abilities of his slaves, whom he described as suffering from overseers of “less understanding and sometimes less integrity than those poor blacks.” Dispensing with a white overseer, Ross employed a slave named Abram to superintend the foundry. Because iron-making required special skills developed over many years, Ross provided positive incentives to the most able workers: extra food and good clothing. Needing a stable community of laborers, Ross tried to sustain the family cohesion that the enslaved longed for. Unlike other masters, he avoided selling any slaves, even those redundant for his operations, lest he alienate his skilled workers.12
But that apparently stable community lay atop a volcanic debt that erupted after Ross died in March 1817. Four months later, the Oxford Iron Works closed, and all of his slaves went on the auction block, passing to forty-seven different owners, who dispersed them to many newer ironworks farther west. Even the best conditions for slaves proved short-lived in a society that valued them as commodities needed to cover debts and provide inheritances.13
Conscience usually lost in the struggle with money for the fate of slaves. Widow McCroskey inherited her husband’s debts as well as his sl
aves. Devoted to the house servants, she regretted her inability to keep them all. In November 1803, she wrote to St. George Tucker, who served as her legal advisor: “Every day, my d[ea]r friend, I am wounded by their coming to me to know what is to be done with them.” Although she lamented the fate of the “poor young fellows that are to be the innocent victims of debt,” she especially regretted that they would sell for only half of their appraised worth. After auctioning them, McCroskey updated Tucker:
What a scene of distress have I waided thro this two days. Oh Heavens this trafick in human flesh, how I shudder at it. How wretched I have made my family and myself. Poor souls, three of them have had hard fate to fall in[to] the hands of the most cruel men in the country and I am the cause of it by selling them at public auction—but you say I must do so. . . . There was a negroe girl whose tears and intreaties made me make a bid for her, but I had her set up again.
The widow cast herself as the primary victim in the tragedy, punished by debt and her own superior sensibility over the sad fate of her slaves. But she feared debt and poverty even more than she hated to sell her slaves.14
Slaves anxiously watched their masters for signs of financial distress or deteriorating health and found the combination terrifying. Josiah Henson recalled the death of his first master in 1795 as “a great calamity to us, for the estate and the slaves were to be sold and the proceeds divided among the heirs.” The slaves felt “the frantic terror at the idea of being sent ‘down south’: the almost certainty that one member of a family will be torn from another; the anxious scanning of purchasers’ faces; the agony at parting, often forever, with husband, wife, and child.” Although only six years old, Henson was sold to a tavern-keeper who lived forty miles away.15