The Great Stain

by Noel Rae

  —HENRY WALSON

  There were several ways to throw dogs off the scent. “I could do it with red pepper,” recalled John Warren, who escaped from Mississippi to Canada. “Another way I have practised is to dig into a grave where a man has been buried a long time, get the dust of the man, make it into a paste with water, and put it on the feet, knees, and elbows, or wherever I touched the bushes. The dogs won’t follow that.” Turpentine and onions were also used. So were Indian turnips, dried, pulverized and tied in bags, around the feet. “No bloodhound could trail a bit further after smelling it,” claimed Gus Smith of Missouri.

  Patrols. “On Bayou Boeuf there is an organization of patrollers, as they are styled, whose business it is to seize and whip any slave they may find wandering from the plantation. They ride on horseback, headed by a captain, armed, and accompanied by dogs. They have the right, either by law or by general consent, to inflict discretionary chastisement upon a black man caught beyond the boundaries of his master’s estate without a pass, and even to shoot him if he attempts to escape. Each company has a certain distance to ride up and down the bayou. They are compensated by the planters, who contribute in proportion to the number of slaves they own. The clatter of their horses’ hoofs dashing by can be heard at all hours of the night, and frequently they may be seen driving a slave before them, or leading him by a rope fastened around his neck, to his owner’s plantation.”

  —SOLOMON NORTHUP

  “These are just about the worst fellows that can be found; as bad as any you could pick up on the wharves … If a slave don’t open his door to them, at any time of night, they break it down. They steal his money, if they can find it, and act just as they please with his wives and daughters. If a husband dares to say a word, or even look as if he wasn’t quite satisfied, they tie him up and give him thirty-nine lashes. If there’s any likely young girls in a slave’s hut, they’re mighty apt to have business there … Oh how often I’ve seen the poor girls sob and cry when there’s been such goings on! Maybe you think, because they’re slaves, they ain’t got no feelings and no shame. A woman’s being a slave don’t stop her genteel ideas; that is, according to their way, and as far as they can. They know they must submit to their masters; besides, their masters, maybe, dress ’em up, and make ’em little presents, and give ’em more privileges, while the whim lasts; but that ain’t like having a parcel of low, dirty, swearing, drunk patter rollers let loose among ’em, like so many hogs. This breaks down their spirits dreadfully, and makes ’em wish they were dead.”

  —LEWIS CLARK

  “I remember one time they was a dance at one of the houses in the quarters. All the niggers was a-laughing and a-patting they feet and a-singing … The paddyrollers shove the door open and start grabbing us. Uncle Joe’s son he decide they was one time to die and he start to fight. He say he tired standing so many beatings, he just can’t stand no more. The paddyrollers start beating him and he start fighting. Oh Lordy, it were trouble. They whip him with a cowhide for a long time, then one of them take a stick and hit him over the head, and just bust his head wide open. The poor boy fell on the floor just a-moaning and a-groaning. The paddyrollers just whip about half a dozen other niggers and send ’em home and leave us with the dead boy.”

  —FANNIE MOORE

  Poor Whites. “The institution of slavery has produced not only heathenish, degraded, miserable slaves, but it produces a class of white people who are, by universal admission, more heathenish, degraded and miserable. The institution of slavery has accomplished the double feat, in America, not only of degrading and brutalising her black working classes, but of producing, notwithstanding a fertile soil and abundant room, a poor white population as degraded and brutal as ever existed in any of the most crowded districts of Europe.

  “The way it is done can be made apparent in a few words. 1. The distribution of the land into large plantations, and the consequent sparseness of settlement, make any system of common school education impracticable. 2. The same case operates with regard to the preaching of the Gospel. 3. The degradation of the idea of labor, which results inevitably from enslaving the working class, operates to a great extent in preventing respectable working men of the middling classes from settling or remaining in slave States.” As a consequence, “without schools or churches, these miserable families grow up heathen on a Christian soil, in idleness, vice, dirt, and discomfort of all sorts. They are the pest of the neighborhood, the scoff and contempt or pity even of the slaves. The expressive phrase, so common in the mouths of the Negroes, of ‘poor white trash,’ says all for this luckless race of beings that can be said … This miserable class of whites form, in all the Southern States, a material for the most horrible and ferocious of mobs. Utterly ignorant, and inconceivably brutal, they are like some blind, savage monster which, when aroused, tramples heedlessly over everything in its way.

  “Singular as it may appear, though slavery is the cause of the misery and degradation of this class, yet they are the most vehement and ferocious advocates of slavery. The reason is this: they feel the scorn of the upper classes, and their only means of consolation is in having a class below them, whom they may scorn in turn. To set the negro at liberty would deprive them of this last comfort; and accordingly no class of men advocate slavery with such frantic and unreasoning violence, or hate abolitionists with such demoniac hatred. The leaders of the community, those men who play upon other men with as little care for them as a harper plays on a harp, keep this blind, furious monster of the MOB very much as an overseer keeps his plantation-dogs, as creatures to be set on to any man or thing whom they may choose to have put down. These leading men have used the cry of ‘abolitionism’ over the mob much as a huntsman uses the ‘set on’ to his dogs. Whenever they have a purpose to carry, a man to put down, they have only to raise this cry, and the monster is wide awake, ready to spring wherever they shall send him.”

  —A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin

  Dueling. Slavery was also responsible for a readiness to settle disputes by violent means. Reports of “affrays, duels, street-fights, shootings, stabbings and assassinations,” wrote the visiting traveler, J.S. Buckingham, filled southern newspapers, and were so commonplace as to arouse only passing interest. For example, the day he arrived in Charleston, “there was a duel fought in the public street, and in the presence of many people, none of whom interfered. Two young men from the country were in attendance at the Court of Law then sitting in Charleston, and some angry words having passed between them, there was an immediate challenge given and accepted; when the parties, either having pistols with them, or procuring them very speedily, repaired to the public street, and there, in the middle of the day, and in the presence of several spectators and passers-by, measured off twelve paces and exchanged fire. One of the combatants was shot through the cheek, and disfigured for life, and the other was slightly wounded in the thigh. The parties then withdrew from the combat, but no notice was taken of the affair by the public authorities, and with the community it excited no sensation beyond the passing hour.”

  In 1839, while residing on her husband’s plantation on St. Simon’s Island, Fanny Kemble read this story in the Brunswick Advertiser about two neighbors who had quarreled about a property line: “It is with pain we lay before our readers an account of a fatal affray which took place in this city on Monday last, between Mr. John A. Wylly and Dr. Thomas F. Hazzard, both of this county … They met on the piazza of the Oglethorpe House, and after exchanging a few words, Mr. W. struck Dr. H. with a cane. Judge Henry, who was here holding a term of the Supreme Court, and Col. Du Bignon, happening to be present, immediately interfered and succeeded in separating them. A short time after, Mr. W. again met Dr. H. in the entry of the house and spat in his face, when the latter drew a pistol and fired, the ball of which passed directly through Mr. W.’s heart. He reeled a moment, at the same time striking at the doctor with his cane, then fell and expired instantly.”

  A few days later, Fanny went to vi
sit some genteel neighbors. They discussed the fight “and both ladies agreed that there was not the slightest chance of Dr. H.’s being punished in any way for the murder he had committed; that shooting down a man who had offended you was part of the morals and manners of the Southern gentry, and that the circumstance was one of quite too frequent occurrence to cause any sensation, even in the small community where it obliterated one of the principal members of the society. If the accounts given by these ladies of the character of the planters in this part of the South may be believed, they must be as idle, arrogant, ignorant, dissolute and ferocious as that medieval chivalry to which they are fond of comparing themselves.”

  Censorship. This took two forms: self-censorship—widespread, unacknowledged, and highly effective; and imposed censorship, sometimes official, but more often the work of Committees of Vigilance backed by Lynch Law and mobs. Here, from The Life of Benjamin Lundy, is one example: “At Charleston, South Carolina, on the 29th of July, [1835] it became known soon after the arrival of the mail from New York, that a large quantity of abolition tracts had come in it. This fact, being published in the Courier of the next morning, caused a great excitement. On the succeeding evening, between 10 and 11 o’clock, a number of persons assembled, forcibly entered the post office by wrenching open a window, and carried off the packages containing ‘the incendiary matter,’ as it was called.” Next evening, in accordance with a notice published in the newspapers, “the pamphlets, &c. were burnt at 8 o’clock, P.M., opposite the main guard house, three thousand persons being present.” At the same time, William Lloyd Garrison and other abolitionists were burned in effigy.

  In August of the same year an unfortunate youth named Amos Dresser, “a former student of Lane [Theological] Seminary and a member of the Anti-Slavery Society established at that institution, was arrested at a Methodist camp-meeting ground near Nashville, Tennessee, on a charge of having in his possession, and distributing, incendiary abolition publications. He had left Cincinnati on the 1st of July, with the ‘Cottage Bible’ [edited for home study] and some other religious books for sale, and had also taken some Anti-Slavery publications, the most of which he left at Danville, Ky., where an Anti-Slavery Society existed. On his arrival at Nashville, he sent his barouche [carriage] to be repaired, inadvertently leaving in the box some anti-slavery tracts and other pamphlets. The workmen employed on the barouche found and examined the tracts, one of which was a number of the Anti-Slavery Record, containing ‘a print of a drove of slaves chained, the two foremost having violins on which they were playing—the American flag waving in the center, while the slave-driver with his whip was urging on the rear.’ It was then reported that Mr. Dresser had been ‘circulating incendiary periodicals among the free colored people, and trying to excite the slaves to insurrection.’” Hauled before “a committee of vigilance consisting of sixty prominent citizens,” Dresser denied preaching insurrection, claimed that the offending tract had been nothing more than a wrapper for the Cottage Bible, and while acknowledging “his anti-slavery sentiments, declared that he sought the good both of the master and the slave; contemplated emancipation through persuasion; and that in his few interviews with slaves he had recommended to them quietness, patience, and submission. The committee, having deliberated, found him guilty: 1. Of being a member of the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society. 2. Of having in his possession periodicals published by the American Anti-Slavery Society; and thirdly they declared that they believed he had circulated those periodicals, and advocated the principles inculcated in them. They therefore sentenced him to receive twenty lashes on his bare back, and to leave the place in twenty-four hours. He was then taken to the public square, it being near midnight; and the punishment was inflicted by Mr. Braughton, the principal police officer, with a heavy cow-skin, in the presence of a large circle of spectators.”

  Censorship was also enforced by state laws. In 1857, Samuel Green, a free Negro of Cambridge, Maryland, was indicted “for having in his possession papers, pamphlets and pictorial representations having a tendency to create discontent, etc, among the people of color in the State.” The evidence was collected when “a party of gentlemen from New Market district went at night to Green’s house and made search, whereupon was found a volume of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a map of Canada, several schedules of routes to the North, and a letter from his son in Canada.” There were two trials. The first was “for having in possession the letter, map, and route schedules,” but despite the fact that “nine-tenths of the community in which he lived believed that he had a hand in the running away of slaves, it was the opinion of the court that the law under which he was indicted was not applicable to the case.” Green was discharged, but was then “immediately arraigned upon another indictment, for having in possession Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” This time there were no legal quibbles, and he was “found guilty by the court, and sentenced to the penitentiary for the term of ten years.”

  Captioned “A slave auction in Virginia,” this picture appeared in The Illustrated London News in 1861. The Civil War was followed closely in Britain, where opinion was divided. A desire not to offend readers who sympathized with the South may account for the picture’s somewhat neutral style.

  THE INTERNAL SLAVE TRADE

  During the first sixty years of the nineteenth century some one million slaves were transferred from the east to the newly acquired territories in the southwest, there to work on the sugar and cotton plantations. The principal slave-exporting states were Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Missouri; these were known as “breeding states.” Traders would travel from plantation to plantation, or market to market, steadily adding to their stock. The slaves traveled in coffles, the men roped or chained together, the women and children unfettered. Sometimes they were shipped south by boat, but more usually they went on foot. Journeys were usually made in winter, when there was less work to be done.

  Ten years seems to have been the lowest age at which slaves were bought or sold without their parents. “I wish to purchase immediately, for the South, any number of Negroes from 10 to 30 years of age, for which I will pay the very highest cash prices,” ran an advertisement in the Alexandria Gazette. And from the Lynchburg Virginian: “The subscriber … is giving the highest cash prices for negroes between the ages of 10 and 30 years.” But there were many exceptions, as in this from the New Orleans Bulletin: “Negros for Sale.—A negro woman 21years of age, and has two children, one eight and the other three years. Said negroes will be sold separately or together as desired. She will be sold for cash, or exchanged for groceries.” And from the Milledgeville Journal: “Executor’s Sale. Agreeable to an order of the court of Wilkinson County, will be sold on the first Tuesday in April next, before the Court-house door in the town of Irwinton, one negro girl, about two years old, named Rachel, belonging to the estate of William Chambers dec’d.”

  Almost always, being sold meant separation for life. There was no exchange of letters, since parents did not know where their children had gone; also, most slaves were illiterate, and none were allowed to use the mails. Contemporary estimates of the numbers sold varied greatly. In 1836 the Virginia Times put the figure from that state at forty thousand a year. In 1837, the Rev. Dr. Graham of North Carolina stated that “there were nearly seven thousand slaves offered in New Orleans market last winter. From Virginia alone six thousand were annually sent to the South, and from Virginia and North Carolina there had gone to the South, in the last twenty years, three hundred thousand slaves.” Many whites felt it to be a shameful business, not at all in harmony with the “benevolent patriarch” image they liked to cherish. “How can an honourable mind,” asked Thomas Jefferson Randolph of Virginia, “a patriot, and a lover of his country, bear to see this Ancient Dominion, rendered illustrious by the noble devotion and patriotism of her sons in the cause of liberty, converted into one grand menagerie, where men are to be reared for the market, like oxen for the shambles [slaughterhouse].”

  “Never knew
who Marsa done sold,” recalled Nancy Williams, of Virginia, in her old age. “Remember one morning old whiteman ride up in a buggy and stop plumb by a gal named Lucy that was working in the yard. He say, ‘Come on, get in this buggy. I bought you this morning.’ Then she beg him to let her go tell her baby and husband goodbye, but he say, ‘Naw! Get in this buggy! Ain’t got no time for crying and carrying on.’ I started crying myself, ’cause I’se so scared he gonna take me too. But old aunt Crissy, whose child it was, went to Marsa and told him he was a mean dirty nigger-trader. Old Marsa got sore, but ain’t never said nothing to Aunt Crissy. Then Hendley, what was next to the youngest of her seven chillun got sick and died. Aunt Crissy ain’t sorrowed much. She went straight up to old Marsa and shouted in his face, ‘Praise God, praise God! My little chile is gone to Jesus. That’s one chile of mine you never gonna sell.”

  And there was this from Sis Shackelford: “Had a slave-jail built at the cross-roads with iron bars cross the windows. Soon’s the coffle get there, they bring all the slaves from the jail, two at a time, and string them along the chain back of the other poor slaves. Everybody in the village come out, specially the wives and sweethearts and mothers, to see their sold-off chillun for the last time. And when they start the chains a-clanking and step off down the line, they all just sing and shout and make all the noise they can, trying to hide the sorrow in their hearts and cover up the cries and moanings of them they’s leaving behind.”