Five Thousand Years of Slavery

by Marjorie Gann

  To prevent rebellion, South Carolina enacted the harsh Negro Act. Not only did it forbid slaves from meeting one another outside their plantations, but it dictated the smallest details of their lives, including what clothes they could wear and what fabrics they could use. A white person who killed a black would be fined, but a slave could be executed for killing a white, planning a revolt, conspiring to run away, committing arson, making poisons, or teaching another slave about poison.

  A few sections of the law may actually have made life a little easier for slaves. Owners faced penalties if they didn’t provide sufficient food, clothing, and shelter for their slaves, if they didn’t give them Sundays off, or if they made them work more than fifteen hours a day during the hottest time of the year.

  IN GULLAH COUNTRY

  The slaves who lived on the Sea Islands off South Carolina had come from the part of Africa that is now Sierra Leone and Liberia. Their language became known as Gullah, perhaps after the Gola people from that region. Because the slaves were isolated, they managed to keep the words of their homeland alive. Some familiar words like yam and tote probably came from the Gullah language.

  No matter how they tried, slaveholders on plantations or in cities could not stamp out traces of the lives slaves had lived in Africa, and they couldn’t stop their slaves from having friendships, especially with those who knew their native language and customs. What a comfort that must have been to people longing for home. Slaves tried in many ways to keep their connection to their homelands. Many of them built their houses to resemble African huts with thatched roofs or clay walls. Sue Snow, a slave born in Alabama, said her mother wanted a dirt-covered floor like the ones she had known in Africa, and refused the floorboards that other slaves had.

  Some slave traditions became popular with both whites and blacks. Christmas was a day of celebration in many slave households, but not always because of the religious holiday. It was also the occasion for the John Canoe festivities – fancy costumes, music, and parades. Some historians think the celebration began in West Africa, but no one is sure.

  A BORING JOB

  In 1802, when Austin Steward was an eight-year-old house slave, his job was to wait in his owner’s house all day and into the night in case anyone wanted to send him on an errand. He could not sit if a member of the family was in the room. Sometimes he stood behind his master’s chair for an entire day, Steward recalled in a narrative he later wrote. What torture that must have been for an energetic child!

  In Edenton, North Carolina, slaves from neighboring plantations marched through the town playing homemade instruments, wearing cows’ tails, horns, and other costumes, and partying, said former slave Harriet Jacobs:

  For a month previous they are composing songs, which are sung on this occasion. These companies, of a hundred each, turn out early in the morning, and are allowed to go round till twelve o’clock, begging for contributions. Not a door is left unvisited where there is the least chance of obtaining a penny or a glass of rum. They do not drink while they are out, but carry the rum home in jugs, to have a carousal. These Christmas donations frequently amount to twenty or thirty dollars. It is seldom that any white man or child refuses to give them a trifle.

  Jacobs’s owner told his daughter that John Canoe was the highlight of Christmas in 1838. Without these celebrations, he wrote, Christmas “would have passed without the least manifestation of mirth, cheerful joy, or hilarity.”

  John Canoe parades were popular in North Carolina, the Bahamas, and Jamaica. In this Jamaican band, the man in the center is drumming on a goatskin stretched over a wooden frame. The man on the left is playing a rasp made from the lower jaw of a horse, creating a rattling noise by running a piece of wood back and forth over the teeth.

  Photo Credit 9.4

  John Canoe celebrations must have been bittersweet for slaves. New Year’s Day, just a week away, was the traditional day when they were bought and sold, and for some of them, Christmas would be their last happy time together. “Were it not that hiring day is near at hand, and many families are fearfully looking forward to the probability of separation in a few days,” Jacobs wrote, “Christmas might be a happy season for the poor slaves.”

  Thoughts of Equality

  Because eighteenth-century America was not yet a country, colonists from Massachusetts in the north right down to South Carolina still thought of themselves as British, but many were outraged by the way the British government treated them. The “mother country” needed money, and tried to get it by taxing the colonists. Colonists railed against “taxation without representation” because they were asked to pay British taxes without having a vote in the British Parliament. A slaveholder in Philadelphia wrote, “Those who are taxed without their own consent … are slaves!” Other colonists took up the cry, declaring that they would not be “slaves” to Britain, and demanding equality with their fellow citizens across the ocean.

  Blacks, and some whites, too, thought the colonists’ arguments should apply to slavery. In 1773, slaves in Massachusetts went to the legislature to ask for their liberty, saying, “We have no Property! We have no Wives! No children! We have no City! No Country!” but “in common with all other men we have a natural right to our freedoms.” The delegates were not won over.

  Others used religion as an argument against slavery. In 1700, Samuel Sewall, a respected judge, had published The Selling of Joseph: A Memorial to show that the Bible condemns the buying and selling of human beings. People in Sewall’s time found verses in the Bible to justify slavery as well, but Sewall refused to read the Bible that way, or to excuse slavery as a means of saving Africans’ souls by making them Christians. “Evil must not be done, that good may come of it,” he said, and since capturing Africans separated husbands from wives, and parents from children, he considered it a great evil.

  When people excused slavery because the captives had been taken from their homes by Africans in a lawful war, Sewall denied that a war to take captives could be lawful, and said that those who bought slaves were as guilty as the people who had captured them. He reminded his readers that the Bible taught them to treat others as they themselves wished to be treated because God made all people of “One Blood.”

  The American Revolution

  Liberty was increasingly on the colonists’ minds. By the 1760s, colonists who were demanding more rights were known as Patriots. Those who wanted to remain subjects of Britain were known as Loyalists. Patriot anger turned explosive in April 1775, when a British armed force and members of a local militia exchanged gunfire in Lexington, Massachusetts. Eight Patriots died. It was the first battle in the colonists’ war for independence from Britain, the American Revolution.

  In May 1775, Patriots sent delegates from each of the colonies to Philadelphia for a meeting they called the Second Continental Congress (the first had met just a year earlier). The congress was to manage the war effort for the Patriots, and it named George Washington the commander in chief of the Continental Army. On July 2, 1776, while the war was still raging, the congress declared the colonies’ independence, and two days later it issued a written Declaration of Independence. The declaration expressed the colonists’ grievances against Britain and the rights due to the people, including “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Fifty-six delegates signed the document, and they are among the statesmen known as the Founders.

  Most of America’s Founders knew that slavery was wrong, but many were slave owners themselves. George Washington bought and sold slaves before the Revolution, until he had something of a change of heart. He refused to sell any of his slaves or even hire them out, and in 1799, he wrote to a nephew that he was “principled against this kind of traffic in the human species. To hire them out is almost as bad because they could not be disposed of in families to any advantage, and to disperse the families I have an aversion.” Washington didn’t free his slaves in his lifetime or even when he died. In his will he directed that they be freed after his wife died. Thom
as Jefferson, who wrote “All men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence, freed only eight of his many slaves in his lifetime and did not free the rest in his will. And though he was against the international slave trade, he sold many of his own slaves within the country.

  Washington as a Farmer was painted more than fifty years after the president’s death, when there was more opposition to slavery. The artist portrays Washington favorably by showing his slaves as contented and well dressed and doing leisurely work, with refreshments handy.

  Photo Credit 9.5

  Another prominent colonist, the Massachusetts lawyer James Otis Jr., owned slaves but still wrote, “The colonists are by the law of nature freeborn, as indeed all men are, white or black.… Does it follow that ’tis right to enslave a man because he is black? … It is a clear truth that those who every day barter away other men’s liberty will soon care little for their own.…”

  The Founders were used to lives of privilege and ease, and to give up the slaves who made their comfortable lives possible would be “inconvenient,” to quote Patrick Henry, a Virginian who supported the revolution. He said that every thinking honest man opposed slavery in principle, but not in practice. When colonists spoke about the equality of men, they were not thinking of blacks or of women. They meant that they wanted the same rights as men of their rank in Britain. They were not willing to give up any of their property, which included slaves.

  Both the Loyalists and the Patriots were short of troops, and both sides enlisted blacks to fight. More blacks joined the Loyalists because the British promised them freedom. The British governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, reasoned that black labor and troops would strengthen the Loyalist side, and their flight would rob Patriots of their slave labor force. On November 14, 1775, he issued a proclamation declaring “all indented servants, Negroes, or others … free, that are able and willing to bear arms.”

  In the end probably only eight hundred black men joined Lord Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment, whose uniforms proclaimed, “Liberty to Slaves.” As word spread that Dunmore had offered freedom, around a hundred thousand slaves escaped behind British lines.

  The Patriots also talked of promising freedom to slaves who fought for them, but in the end the colonies of South Carolina and Georgia blocked the offer. They were afraid that the slave system would collapse.

  One of the most famous black soldiers, Colonel Tye, ran away from his cruel master the day after Dunmore’s proclamation and joined the Ethiopian Regiment. He knew where the swamps and creeks were, and his troops, both black and white, stole supplies and freed slaves in raids against the Patriots in New York and New Jersey. The British recognized his bravery by calling him captain and then colonel, although the titles weren’t official – because he was black. Tye died in action, but his regiment fought until the end of the war.

  In September 1783, Britain and the former colonies signed a peace treaty, ending the war. An independent nation, the United States of America, was born.

  Black and white soldiers fought side by side in many battles. One officer said, “The Negro can take the field instead of his master, and therefore [in every regiment there are] Negroes in abundance and among them are able-bodied and strong fellows.” These men are dressed in uniforms of the 1770s.

  Photo Credit 9.6

  Freedom for Some

  Boston King was a fugitive slave who served with the British forces. He made his way to New York after the war, and later wrote that runaways had been desperate because of news they had heard:

  All the slaves, in number 2000, were to be delivered up to their masters, altho’ some of them had been three or four years among the English. This dreadful rumour filled us all with inexpressible anguish and terror, especially when we saw our old masters coming from Virginia, North Carolina, and other parts, and seizing upon their slaves in the streets of New York, or even dragging them out of their beds. Many of the slaves had very cruel masters, so that the thoughts of returning home with them embittered life to us. For some days we lost our appetite for food, and sleep departed from our eyes.

  The rumor had some truth to it. Owners petitioned Congress to have runaways returned to them; others spent large amounts to bribe policemen to turn their former slaves over to them, or to hire agents to find them. But Sir Guy Carleton, the commander in chief of the British forces in the colonies, kept Lord Dunmore’s promise to free blacks who had crossed over to British lines.

  The British evacuated King and his wife and about four thousand other former slaves to their colony of Nova Scotia in Canada. But when they got there, the evacuees did not find the welcome they had hoped for. The Nova Scotians cheated them out of good land, mobs attacked them, and people drove them from their homes. Still hoping for a better life, the Kings joined a group of blacks who traveled to West Africa and settled in a colony in Sierra Leone in 1792.

  Law of the Land

  The new American nation required new laws. George Washington presided when delegates met in Philadelphia in 1787 to enact a constitution. Laws on slavery were the most controversial they discussed. Some delegates wanted to ban slavery outright, others wanted to limit the slave trade, and still others wanted no restrictions. Delegates from South Carolina and Georgia declared that their states would not join the union if slavery was abolished.

  The framers decided to avoid the word “slavery.” It does not appear anywhere in the Constitution. Instead, they protected the institution of slavery by saying that a “Person held to Service or Labour” in one state would remain in service, and must be returned to his or her owner. This meant that a runaway slave could not become free by fleeing to territory that banned slavery. Individual states could ban slavery, but the federal Constitution allowed it to continue.

  Elizabeth Freeman, a Massachusetts slave, had heard talk about the new constitution of the state of Massachusetts, which said that “all men are born free and equal.” One day in 1781, after her mistress struck her with a heated kitchen shovel, Freeman stalked out of the house, determined to claim her rights in court. When her master tried to get her back, she approached a lawyer, Theodore Sedgwick. Sedgwick went to court on behalf of Freeman as well as another of the owner’s slaves, known today only as Brom. A jury ruled in their favor. When another Massachusetts slave claimed his freedom, Chief Justice William Cushing concluded in his trial notes that “there can be no such thing as perpetual servitude of a rational Creature,” and instructed the jury that slavery was unconstitutional in Massachusetts. Slavery ended there in 1783. By 1804, all northern states would have laws abolishing slavery, either immediately or gradually.

  Slave owners in the other states were jittery. The slave revolt in St-Domingue in 1791 was fresh in their minds and they had not forgotten those earlier American slave revolts. Now they feared something worse. Word traveled fast, even in those days. Owners knew their slaves would hear about the successful Caribbean revolt, and they were certain it would give them ideas.

  It did. In Virginia, in 1800, an elaborate conspiracy led by blacksmith Gabriel Prosser was uncovered. The plan was to march on the capital, Richmond, seize weapons, take white officials hostage, and negotiate the slaves’ freedom. The plot was thwarted when two slaves panicked and confessed. Prosser and twenty-five other slaves were hanged for conspiracy.

  The Country Grows

  In 1803, the United States bought a vast amount of territory from the French. Known as the Louisiana Purchase, the land extended the United States to the southwest and doubled its size. This was prime land for growing cotton, and for that, planters demanded slaves.

  COTTON TAKES OVER

  An invention can change the course of history, and the cotton gin (short for “engine”) did just that. When Eli Whitney traveled to Georgia in 1793, he saw that the work of removing clean cotton from the seed pods took so long that few farmers wanted to tackle the crop. He designed a machine that would make it easier and cheaper to produce cotton, just when people in the North and in Europe want
ed more cotton cloth. New cotton plantations were created – bringing wealth to plantation owners and textile manufacturers, but not to the slaves who produced the crop.

  By 1789, Congress had banned slavery from the country’s northwest region but not from the southwest. This meant that, as new territories became states, some would allow slaves and others would not. Most of the land in the Louisiana Purchase was in the south, where the newly arrived cotton planters could bring their slaves.

  While the country was growing, trouble with Britain resurfaced. Arguments over trade and territory led to the War of 1812, which was fought from as far north as Canada, which was British at the time, to as far south as Louisiana. As in the Revolution, some slaves aided the British in hopes of gaining their freedom. General Andrew Jackson offered slaves freedom and the same pay as whites if they would join him on the American side in battle in New Orleans, Louisiana.

  James Roberts was one of the recruits. With little training in warfare, he and the other slaves marched three hundred miles (480 km) from Natchez, Mississippi, to join Jackson’s army in New Orleans. When they spotted the British soldiers, Roberts was terrified, with good reason. The British troops outnumbered the Americans, and they were better trained. Before the battle began, according to Roberts, Jackson was unsure how to proceed. One of the black soldiers suggested building a fort of cotton bales with portholes to shoot through, and even supervised the construction. Jackson’s troops quickly defeated the British. Roberts lost the forefinger of his left hand and suffered a head wound, but later he was dealt an even harsher blow – Jackson denied him his freedom. “You are not my property, and I cannot take another man’s property and set it free,” said the general. Roberts felt betrayed, and later explained: