by Noel Rae
THE GREAT STAIN
WITNESSING AMERICAN SLAVERY
NOEL RAE
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Comprising personal accounts from an intensely consequential chapter in our country’s history, The Great Stain tells the story of American slavery from its origins in Africa to its abolition with the end of the Civil War.
In this “essential” (Kirkus) new work, Noel Rae integrates firsthand accounts into a narrative history that brings the reader face to face with slavery’s everyday reality, expertly weaving together narratives that span hundreds of years. From the travel journals of sixteenth-century Spanish settlers who offered religious instruction and “protection” in exchange for farm labor, to the diaries of poetess Phillis Wheatley and Reverend Cotton Mather, to Central Park designer Frederick Law Olmsted’s book about traveling through the “cotton states,” to an 1880 speech given by Frederick Douglass, Rae provides a comprehensive accounting of parties from throughout the antebellum history of the nation. Rae also draws on a wide variety of accounts from less distinguished individuals: a surgeon describes the brutal treatment and squalid conditions onboard a slave ship as he made his daily rounds to collect the dead; an Englishman visiting Haiti observes violent uprisings as, separated from the population on the mainland, slaves were able to overpower their captors.
Most significant are the texts from and interviews with former slaves themselves, ranging from the famous Solomon Northup to the virtually unknown Mary Reynolds, who was sold away from her mother and subsequently bought back not for sentiment or kindness, but because after losing her daughter, the family’s wet nurse began to waste away from grief. Surpassing a dispassionate listing of atrocities, Rae places the reader within the era.
Drawing on thousands of original sources, The Great Stain tells of repression and resistance in a society based on the exploitation of the cheapest labor and fallacies of racial superiority. Meticulously researched, this is a work of history that is profoundly relevant to our world today.
Copyright
This edition first published in hardcover in the United States in 2018 by
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
www.overlookpress.com
For bulk and special sales, please contact [email protected]
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Copyright © 2018 by Noel Rae
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
ISBN 978-1-4683-1514-1
CONTENTS
COPYRIGHT
INTRODUCTION
1: Out of Africa
2: The Trade
3: Personal Stories
4: The Middle Passage
5: The Colonies
6: The Revolution
7: The Peculiar Institution
8: White Testimony
9: Black Experience
10: Fugitives
11: Resistance
12: The Positive Good
13: The Abolitionists
14: The Civil War
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
INDEX
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
INTRODUCTION
“WHAT IS A SLAVE?” ASKED WILLIAM WELLS BROWN IN A LECTURE TO THE Female Anti-Slavery Society of Salem, delivered on November 18, 1847. One of the abolitionist movement’s most effective black orators, Brown had himself been a slave, and knew what he was talking about. “A slave is one that is in the power of an owner. He is a chattel; he is a thing; he is a piece of property. A master can dispose of him, can dispose of his labor, can dispose of his wife, can dispose of his offspring, can dispose of everything that belongs to the slave, and the slave shall have no right to speak; he shall have nothing to say.” And what was a chattel? According to the then-current edition of Webster’s dictionary, “Chattels personal are things movable, as animals, furniture.” The word chattel is derived from cattle. The word slave derives from sclavus, the medieval Latin word for Slav—probably because so many of that nation were enslaved by the Holy Roman Emperor, Otto the Great, in the tenth century.
Long before the term was defined the fact of slavery had existed in almost every part of the world and in almost every period of recorded history, and indeed still exists in some countries today. While always entailing the unlimited power of one person over another, it has varied greatly from place to place and time to time. Until they became part of the United States as a result of the Alaska Purchase, the Tlingit Indians made slaves of their Aleutian or Athabascan neighbors, sometimes setting them free when celebrating a potlatch, and more often sacrificing them to bring good luck when building a new house. In ancient Rome a slave might be a gladiator or private secretary to a statesman, and if freed could become a citizen. In the late fourteenth century the Ottoman Sultan Murad I formed a bodyguard of Christian slaves, recruited mostly from the Balkans and called Janissaries, who were paid for their service and could retire on a pension. In pre-colonial Africa slavery was widespread; some of its victims were put to work in the salt mines and millions were sold to traders for re-sale in the Barbary states or for shipment across the Atlantic; but many others, especially domestic servants, were treated as virtual members of the family.
For most of history nobody saw anything wrong with all this. Until the great revolution in thinking that came with the Enlightenment, slavery was accepted as part of the natural order—man was not born free and had no right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. A person who was enslaved was unlucky, to be sure, but he was not the victim of injustice. When, in 1838, President John Quincy Adams called slavery “a deadly disease … the great and foul stain upon the North American Union,” he was expressing an opinion that a mere hundred years earlier was held only by a few political philosophers and a handful of eccentric Quakers.
And not only was it generally accepted, but just about everyone who had a chance to benefit joined in: African rulers who waged war on their neighbors for the sole purpose of capturing and selling them (or, more simply, condemned and sold their own people on trumped-up charges); the Duke of York who, along with other seventeenth-century English aristocrats, invested heavily in the newly-formed Royal African Company; the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, which owned a large sugar-cane plantation in Barbados; the Rev. Cotton Mather, Boston’s leading clergyman, who gratefully accepted a household slave as a gift from his appreciative congregation; Brown and other American universities which had no qualms about taking endowments funded by slave traders. And then there were those more immediately involved in the business: New England distillers whose rum was an important part of almost every purchase; artisans in Germany and Italy who made the colored beads that were popular trading goods; shops in Liverpool that sold thumbscrews and shackles; Northern bankers who advanced the money to buy slaves, insurers who sold policies on their lives, and brokers who handled the cotton business. Even ordinary people in other parts of the world who wore cotton clothing could be considered complicit.
Harsh though the subject is, slavery in America has long been an interest of mine, partly because it is of such intense human interest, partly because it has given rise to so many gripping stories, and partly because it lies at the root of so much that ails America today. As I long ago found (and as
listed in the bibliography), there are already a great many books on the topic—straightforward narrative histories; biographies of abolitionists and of apologists; scholarly books explaining slavery in academic terms; works by cliometricians and economists, full of charts and columns of statistics; specialized books on some particular aspect of the topic; books about politics; and, unavoidably, novels, most notably Uncle Tom’s Cabin and some of the “anti-Tom” novels written in rebuttal. Nearly all these books are important and helpful for understanding the subject, but only a few conveyed a sense of what slavery was actually like. Most of them were like those military histories that tell the reader all about the strategy of a war but nothing about the actual fighting.
And so it seemed to me that there was a place for a book that filled this gap, that brought the reader face-to-face with the everyday reality of life as experienced by the slaves themselves. The question I ask, and try to answer, is not “What happened, and why?” but “What was it like?” And the way to do this was to accumulate as much eyewitness material as I could find and then arrange it into a coherent narrative that told the whole story from first to last in the words of those who were actually there. My role would be to research, select and provide explanatory and connective bridges. To be sure, there are already a number of other books that use firsthand material to tell of some particular period or topic, but none that covers the complete story from the start of the trans-Atlantic trade in the fifteenth century to slavery’s demise with the close of the Civil War and the ratification of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. Listening to the words and voices of those who were actually there is surely the closest we can come to fully understanding their experiences.
Five years of research have gone into compiling the book, much longer than expected due to the abundance of material. First there were the writings of contemporaries who had firsthand knowledge of the business, beginning with the court historian, Gomes de Azurara, who chronicled the first raids carried out by Portuguese on the west coast of Africa in the fifteenth century. After him there was the Venetian Alvise da Cadamosto, who wrote glowingly of the beauties of Africa, and after Cadamosto the buccaneering English, sword in one hand, Bible in the other, who soon came to dominate the trade. It is from such participants as these that we learn firsthand how the slave trade actually worked, how humans were bartered for brandy and guns and gew-gaws, and how perilous the whole business was to the traders themselves due to fevers, sickness and the constant risk of uprisings, many of them successful. It is from these sources also that we have the best accounts of the horrible conditions aboard the slave ships when crossing the Atlantic and the brutal way slaves were sold on arrival. Much of the testimony about slavery during the colonial period also comes from white people: a Virginia aristocrat who filled his diary with complaints about the ingratitude of his “servants”; the trial record of The Great Negro Plot of 1741 (whose alleged aim was to burn New York to the ground); George Washington’s underhand attempts to recover Martha’s slave, Oney Judd, who had escaped to New Hampshire; and, later on, Alexis de Tocqueville’s observations on the pernicious effects that slavery had on the character and well-being of white people.
But of course the most valuable and relevant material came from the slaves themselves. Because most of them were from parts of Africa that did not have a written language, and because the owning class, aware that illiteracy was an effective means of control, made it a crime to teach a slave to read and write, there is a dearth of such material for the early parts of the story—of the ten to twelve million enslaved Africans who were shipped across the Atlantic only a handful have left a written record. When, as a boy, Frederick Douglass, the abolition movement’s charismatic leader, broke the law and taught himself to read he was conscious that doing so was one of his first steps to freedom; and as the nineteenth century progressed there were many others who followed his example—William Wells Brown, Josiah Henson and Harriet Jacobs among them. Many others, such as Harriet Tubman and Charles Ball, told their stories to better-educated sympathizers, who may have added some literary flourishes but got their stories from the mouths of the ex-slaves themselves.
Some of the most powerful accounts told of acts of resistance, a topic that was largely ignored in many of the early histories and in the self-censoring antebellum southern press—which liked to pretend that such things did not exist—but was a major theme in the stories told by slaves. Resistance ran the gamut from infuriating “masters” by slacking off, malingering and deliberately misunderstanding orders, to running away to the North or to Canada, and to open acts of defiance, sometimes collective as in the various famous uprisings, and sometimes individual, of which there are many instances in the book. The final chapter deals with the Civil War, and includes both the small part played by a few slaves in the service of the South and the vital part played by free blacks in the armies of the North.
My years of research resulted in several thousand pages of text, now winnowed down to a few hundred. I hope you will find them worth reading. I say this not from author’s vanity, because although I am the researcher, compiler, fact-checker, arranger, editor, and provider of a fair amount of explanatory and connective material, I am not the author. That title belongs to those whose first-person accounts form the essence of the book.
Cape Coast Castle, owned by the Royal African Company, and one of the many fortified trading posts established by Europeans along what they called the Gold Coast (now Ghana). The castles were built to dominate the local people, fend off rival traders, and warehouse slaves brought down to the coast from far inland. The two large houses were for the traders and the garrison. For the slaves there was a dungeon large enough to hold over a thousand men and women. When they embarked they left by what was known as the Gate of No Return.
CHAPTER 1
OUT OF AFRICA
BROADLY SPEAKING, AND SETTING ASIDE EGYPT, THERE WERE FOUR DISTINCT branches of slavery and the slave trade in Africa, all of them dating back to well before the start of the Christian Era.
First, there was slavery of the domestic kind, the result of wars, law enforcement or the system of money-lending whereby a member of a family was put up as collateral for a loan and became a slave to the lender if the debt was not repaid. Domestic slavery varied from region to region but was widespread and long-established; by some estimates nearly half the continent’s population was held in this kind of bondage. But this was not slavery as practiced in the New World: it was free of color prejudice; those who served as domestics were generally treated as members of the family; those who became soldiers could rise to high rank; the children of concubines were usually free; except for those sent to the salt mines, they were not worked to death; and they could own property, including other slaves. In fact so relaxed was this system—“benign” is the word usually used to describe it—that there are those who say that it does not even deserve to be called slavery.
However, “benign” is not a word that could be applied to the second kind of African slavery, which operated on the continent’s east coast, from Somalia down to Mozambique, including the Comoros Islands and Madagascar. This trade was largely in the hands of the Arabs, who set up business in ports such as Mogadishu, Mombasa and Zanzibar, and from there sent raiding parties as far inland as the Congo. For hundreds of years, until brought to an end in the late nineteenth century by the European colonizing powers, which had their own ways of exploiting the natives, a common sight in East Africa was gangs of slaves roped or chained together by the neck and ankle, shuffling along on their way to the coast, guarded by a few well-armed Arabs. These gangs of slaves were known as “coffles”, from the Arabic word qafilah, meaning caravan or traveling group. Once on the coast they were put on board small ships called dhows and sold in Arabia, Persia, India, and even as far off as China. This was sometimes called the Indian Ocean Trade, and accounted for many millions.
Then there was the sea-going slave trade based in North Africa, whose victims were mostly
Europeans. This had a long history, but greatly increased after North Africa was invaded by Arabs in the ninth century and many Berbers and Moors converted to Islam. Like the Christians, Muslims were not supposed to enslave their co-religionists, but everyone else was fair game. From such bases as Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli, these corsairs were so relentless in their raids on the coasts of Spain, southern France and Italy that the inhabitants either abandoned the coastal areas entirely or took to living in fortified hill-towns. Corsairs also ventured up the Volga River and out into the Atlantic as far north as Iceland. Most of their victims were sold in the slave markets in North Africa, Rome or Constantinople. Not until the French invaded Algeria in the nineteenth century were the Barbary corsairs put out of business.
Also based in North Africa was the trans-Saharan trade. This is thought to date as far back as 1000 BC, but did not really take off until the invading Arabs introduced not just an expansionary Islam, but also the dromedary camel. A much-traveled beast, the dromedary had originated in North America, crossed over to Asia on the Bering land bridge, and been domesticated in Arabia in the third millennium BC. It was well-suited to the trade: it could carry heavy loads, it did not sweat and so could go several days without water, it could close its nostrils during sand storms, its dung could be used for fuel, the protein-rich milk of the female could be drunk by humans, and, in emergencies, the animal itself could be killed, cooked and eaten. According to the sixteenth-century Moorish diplomat Leo Africanus, dromedaries were “gentle and domestical beasts,” but during the mating season they “will deadly wound such persons as have done them any injury. And whomsoever they lay hold on with their teeth, they lift him up on high and cast him down again, trampling on him with their feet.”
On their way south the camels were loaded with such trading goods as expensive cloth, brightly colored glass beads, and, above all, salt, of which there was a dearth throughout the southern parts of west Africa. On arrival at trading towns on or near the Niger River, such as Gao, Timbuktu or Aoudaghast, these goods were exchanged for gold, ivory and slaves. Most of the slaves came from countries to the south, known as the Land of the Blacks, and were acquired in raids or by purchase from local rulers. In addition to all their other miseries, these unfortunates then faced a journey on foot over the stony plateaus of the Sahel and the sands of the Sahara, well over a thousand miles, and ending in a slave market. Slow-going and piecemeal though it was, this trade is estimated to have brought as many as four million slaves to the north.