The Great Stain

by Noel Rae

  “From Virginia, S. Chapel, my master’s son, came there for me, I suppose eight hundred miles, and paid King Blue Salt for me in rum, linen, and a gun; but before he could take me out of the Creek nation I escaped and went to the Natchez Indians, and got to live with their king, Jack.” Before long, King Jack sold him to George Galphin, an influential Indian trader and merchant who lived on the Savannah River at Silver Bluff, “and was very kind to me. I was with him about four years, I think, before I married. Here I lived a bad life and had no serious thoughts about my soul, but after my wife was delivered of her first child a man of my own colour, named Cyrus, who came from Charleston to Silver Bluff, told me one day in the woods that if I lived so I should never see the face of God in Glory.”

  He struggled hard to find salvation. It was only when he realized that “I could not be saved by my own doings, but that it must be by God’s mercy,” that “the Lord took away my distress.” Soon after, George Liele, who was later to become founding pastor of the First African Baptist Church, in Savannah, came to Silver Bluff where he preached a sermon on the text “Come unto me all ye that labour, are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” Other itinerant Baptist pastors also came to Silver Bluff, and soon there was a congregation of “eight of us who had found the great blessing and mercy from the Lord, and my wife was one of them.” All eight were then baptized in the mill stream. The next step came when “I began to exhort in the church, and learned to sing hymns,” after which, although he felt “unfit for all that,” he was appointed to the office of Elder.

  “I proceeded in this way till the American war was coming on, when the ministers were not allowed to come amongst us lest they should furnish us with too much knowledge. The Black people all around attended with us, and as Brother Palmer must not come, I had the whole management and used to preach among them myself. Then I got a spelling book and began to read. As master was a great man he kept a white schoolmaster to teach the white children to read. I used to go to the little children to teach me A, B, C. They would give me a lesson which I tried to learn, and then I would go to them again, and ask them if it was right. The reading so ran in my mind that I think I learned in my sleep as readily as when I was awake, and I can now read the Bible, so that what I have in my heart I can see again in the Scriptures.

  “I continued preaching at Silver Bluff till the Church, constituted with light, increased to thirty or more, and till the British came to the city of Savannah and took it.”

  For the rest of the war the George family stayed in Savannah, where David worked as a butcher. Then, following the British surrender at Yorktown in 1781, he and his family moved to Charleston, where “Major P., the British commander, was very kind to me. When the English were going to evacuate Charlestown, they advised me to go to Halifax, in Nova Scotia, and gave the few black people, and it may be as many as two hundred white people, their passage for nothing.” All in all, about thirty thousand Loyalists went to Nova Scotia, of whom about three thousand were black. Discrimination went with them. Blacks were given the worst land in the remotest places—“small allotments in a soil so overrun with rocks and swamps that some of us have actually perished from hunger” wrote one unhappy settler. “Many of my companions have been obliged to give up our small lots, finding that we could not live upon them, and necessity obliged us to cultivate the lands of white men for half the produce.”

  After arriving in Nova Scotia, David George went to Shelburne, “but found the white people were against me. I began to sing the first night in the woods at a camp, for there were no houses then built, they were just clearing and preparing to erect a town. The black people came far and near, it was so new to them. I kept on so every night in the week, and appointed a meeting for the first Lord’s Day in a valley between two hills, close by the river, and a great number of white and black people came, and I was so overjoyed with having an opportunity once more to preach the Word of God that after I had given out the hymn I could not speak for tears. In the afternoon we met again down the river, in the same place, and I had great liberty from the Lord.”

  They built a simple church. “The worldly Blacks as well as members of the Church assisted in cutting timber in the woods, and in getting shingles, and we used to give a few coppers to buy nails. We were increasing all the winter, and baptized almost every month, and administered the Lord’s Supper.” Some white people also attended, but not for long. “Soon after this the persecution increased, and became so great that it did not seem possible to preach, and I thought I must leave Shelburne. Several of the black people had houses on my lot, but forty or fifty disbanded soldiers came with the tackle of ships, and turned my dwelling house, and every one of their houses, quite over.” Nevertheless, “I continued preaching till they came one night and stood before the pulpit, and swore how they would treat me if I preached again. But I stayed and preached, and the next day they came and beat me with sticks and drove me into the swamp. I returned in the evening and took my wife and children over the river to Birchtown, where some black people were settled.”

  Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Granville Sharp and some other leaders of the British campaign to abolish the slave trade had set up the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor, later to be known as the St. George’s Bay Company, and still later as the Sierra Leone Company. Their plan was to establish a settlement on the west coast of Africa that was to be self-governing, with absolute equality between blacks and whites, as symbolized by a green flag with a black hand and a white hand clasped together. It would also serve as a beach-head for spreading Christianity throughout the continent. Among those recruited to run the operation was Olaudah Equiano, who was appointed Commissary of Provisions and Stores for the Black Poor Going to Sierra Leone. Unfortunately for him, Equiano was too honest and too outspoken for his own good. Outraged by the thefts and “flagrant abuses committed by the agent,” a white man called Irwin, he let it be known that he would expose him; whereupon Irwin took the initiative and accused Equiano of the same offenses; and so Equiano was the one who got fired. And though later fully vindicated by an official inquiry, he never again had a chance of getting back to Africa.

  This was but one of the many setbacks during the first attempt to establish a settlement in Sierra Leone. Far from being the sturdy pioneering types needed, the first settlers were often weakened by poverty and included a number of English prostitutes, “decrepit with disease and so disguised with filth and dirt that I should never have supposed they were born white,” according to the hostile testimony of Anna Maria Falconbridge, the discontented wife of Alexander Falconbridge, the ship’s surgeon whose description of the horrors of the Middle Passage appeared earlier. According to Mrs. Falconbridge, these fallen women had been lured by crimps to the docks at Wapping, a London slum, where “they were intoxicated with liquor, then inveigled on board of ship, and married to black men, whom they had never seen before!” Other setbacks included their arrival just at the beginning of the rainy season, the erratic and often drunken behavior of the local ruler, King Jemmy, who on one occasion set fire to much of the town, the presence of a slaving station at nearby Bance Island, and outbreaks of fever that soon took off most of the settlers. Within four years of its founding their number had dwindled from several hundred to sixty-four—very much the same thing that had happened to the Pilgrims during their first year at Plymouth.

  But before all this bad news was known, it so happened that an Englishman visiting Nova Scotia was invited to dinner by Governor Parr, and while at table gave a glowing description of the Sierra Leone venture. One of the black servants waiting at the governor’s table reported what he had heard to Thomas Peters, a former sergeant in the Black Pioneers. Given the treatment they were receiving in Nova Scotia, and the story about the promised land in Africa, it was not long before Peters had made his way to London and was knocking on Granville Sharp’s door; and not very long after that before he was back in Nova Scotia, accompanied by John Clarkson, a naval officer w
hose task it was to check the bona fides of those who wanted to leave, and keep full accounts. Clarkson was also responsible for reading out the Proclamation from the governors of what had recently been re-organized as the Sierra Leone Company. Headed “Free Settlement on the Coast of Africa,” the proclamation explained that applicants must be able to produce “satisfactory Testimonials of their Characters, (more particularly as to Honesty, Sobriety, and Industry),” known as Certificates of Approbation. After that, “every Free Black (upon producing such a Certificate) shall have a Grant of not less than TWENTY ACRES of LAND for himself, TEN for his Wife, and FIVE for every Child.” In addition, “the civil, military, personal and commercial rights and duties of Blacks and Whites shall be the same.”

  “The white people of Nova Scotia were very unwilling that we should go, though they had been very cruel to us,” wrote David George. “They attempted to persuade us that if we went away we should be slaves again.” Nevertheless, “the brethren and sisters all around St. Johns, Halifax, and other places, Mr. Wesley’s people [i.e. Methodists] and all, consulted what was best to do, and sent in their names to me, to give to Mr. Clarkson, and I was to tell him that they were willing.” Eventually, and to the great dismay of the whites, who would be losing their servants and hired hands, 1196 signed on, about a third of Nova Scotia’s black population (including a former slave called Henry Washington, who had escaped from Mt. Vernon in 1776). The fleet set sail in January, 1792. “Our passage to Sierra Leone was seven weeks stormy weather. Several persons died on the voyage of a catching fever, among whom were three of my Elders.” But at last they neared the African coast. “There was a great joy to see the land, the high mountain, at some distance from Freetown, where we now live.” Although to most sailors the mountain looked like a lion—hence the name, Sierra Leone—to these pilgrims it “appeared like a cloud to us,” a reference to the pillar of cloud that led the Israelites out of Egypt. “I preached the first Lord’s Day,” wrote David George. “It was a blessed time.”

  Founded as a “Province of Freedom” for “the black poor of London,” the settlement at Sierra Leone expanded after the Revolutionary War with the arrival of former Loyalist slaves who had been having a hard time in Nova Scotia. After the British had abolished the slave trade, its capital, Freetown, became the home port for ships of the Royal Navy engaged in suppressing the trade.

  Many disappointments and troubles were in store for the settlers. Newcomers had rights, but were given very little say in how they were governed; the slaving station on nearby Bance Island was a constant menace; the thatched houses easily caught fire; they were attacked by a French ship, whose crew, a “savage-looking set of Republican ragamuffins,” wantonly destroyed many of their buildings. “Burning fevers,” wrote Mrs. Falconbridge, led to “five, six and seven dying daily, and buried with as little ceremony as so many dogs or cats.” There were also the frequent but unwelcome visits of King Jemmy, who “never returns home until he has drank a sufficient quantity of rum or brandy to kindle his savage nature for any manner of wickedness.” Other visitors included armies of cockroaches and ants which “come from their nests in such formidable force as to strike terror wherever they go,” and could be repulsed only by being doused with boiling water. Last but not least, “we have been twice visited by some ferocious wild beast, supposed to be a Tyger.”

  But if ever the settlers thought of giving up, they had only to think back on what they had endured in America, and forward to what they could hope for in Africa. As to the first, here is what a former slave called Warwick Francis told the black Quaker merchant Paul Cuffe during his visit to Sierra Leone in 1812. (Francis’ speech, or Cuffe’s transcription, is a bit confused, but the meaning is clear enough):

  “Sufferings and usage … seen among slaves in America [committed] by Aron Jelot, a doctor. A slave boy tied to a wooden spit so near the fire that it scorch him well, and basted with salt and water, the same as you would a pig.

  “I have also seen Joseph Belseford in the same county chain two of his slaves and make them walk on a plank at a mill pond and those two got drowned. And the said Joseph Belseford gave a man 360 lashes, and then wash him down with salt and water and after that took a brand that he branded his cattle with and make the brand red hot and put it on his buttocks, the same as you would brand a creature.

  “John Draten, I have seen him take his slave and put them in a tierce [cask] and nailed spikes in the tierce and roll down a steep hill.

  “I have seen them with a thumb screw screwed till the blood gushed out of their nails. This I have seen at Isaac Macpherson’s … What I have said I am an eye witness to, it is not what I have heard.”

  As to what they could hope for in Africa, they were now free, and among their freedoms was the right to practice their own forms of religion, a right of which thy took full advantage. “Among the black settlers are seven religious sects,” wrote Mrs. Falconbridge, “and each sect has one or more preachers attached to it, who alternately preach throughout the night. Indeed, I never met with, heard, or read of any set of people observing the same appearance of Godliness; for I do not remember, since they first landed here, my ever awaking (and I have awoke at every hour of the night), without hearing preachings from some quarter or another.”

  Among the stated reasons for founding the colony had been “to civilize and Christianize a great Continent, to bring it out of Darkness, and to abolish the Trade in Men.” This was a cause dear to the heart of David George, who for one of his sermons took as his text Exodus 14: 13. (“And Moses said unto the people, Fear ye not, stand still, and see the salvation of the Lord, which he will shew you this day.”) Part of his sermon ran:

  “We all mind since it was so with us, we was in slavery not many years ago! Some maybe worse oppressed than others, but we was all under the yoke. And what then? God saw our afflictions, and heard our cry, and showed his salvation in delivering us, and bringing us over the mighty waters to this place. Now, stand still and see the salvation of God. God made his salvation go from this city through this heathen land; and as Moses and the children of Israel sung a song when they were delivered and had seen the salvation of God, so I hope to see the heathens about us going through the streets of this city, singing hallelujahs and doxologies to God. I hope to see it … Stand still, and see what God is doing for our nation, putting into the hearts of his people to come from a far distant nation, to come over the mighty waters and great deep, to bring the salvation of God to this nation, to Africans. Stand ye still, and let your hearts be lifted up to Him.”

  Following abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1808 there was a sharp and continuing rise in the internal trade: every year thousands of slaves from the “breeding states” (principally Virginia and Maryland) were raised for the sole purpose of being sold to the cotton and rice-growing states. Washington, D. C. was the principal market for this trade—hence the dome of the Capitol in the background. Once sold, slave families were broken up, shackled, formed into coffles, and marched down to the docks at Alexandria for shipment to New Orleans, where they were re-sold.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE PECULIAR INSTITUTION

  THIS WAS A TERM SOUTHERNERS CAME UP WITH WHEN LOOKING FOR A euphemism for slavery, using “peculiar” in the sense of “distinctive” or “special to us.” Like many another institution that evolved over a long period of time and in different places, it was complex, often irrational and contradictory, based on powerful economic interests and wishful thinking. As a guide to this ramshackle structure, here is a catalog of some of its parts.

  THE CONSTITUTION

  There were at least two ways of looking at this document. First there was the “miracle at Philadelphia” school of thought, according to which a handful of exceptionally far-sighted and high-minded statesmen—“an assembly of demi-gods,” as Jefferson put it—brought forth the best system of government the world has ever seen. Then there was the “compact with the Devil” view, popular in the nineteen
th century with abolitionists and in the twentieth with radicals and communists. To these critics the constitution, for all its talk of rights and liberties, was little more than a conspiracy on the part of property-owners to protect their interests and thwart the will of the people, while also condemning millions of slaves to decades of suffering, and making inevitable a bloody civil war.

  How justified was this view? Consider the notorious “three-fifths” provision (Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3), which greatly increased the political power of the slaveholders: “Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years [i.e. white indentured servants], and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons [i.e. slaves].” Then there was Article 1, Section 9, Clause 1, which allowed the slave trade to continue for another twenty years: “The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight …” Section 4 of Article 4 guaranteed that the federal government would protect every state against both invasion and “domestic violence,” i.e. a slave insurrection. And Clause 3 of Section 2 of Article 4 stated that “no Person held to Service or Labor in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labor, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labor may be due.”