[It] was by the indomitable bravery of the colored men that the battle was fought and victory gained. Had there been less bravery with us, the British would have gained the victory, and in that event they would have set the slaves free; so that I now can see how we, in that war, contributed to fasten our chains tighter.
The war ended in 1815. The British left but slavery remained. In just ten years, between 1810 and 1820, slave traders shipped approximately 120,000 slaves to Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. In 1819, Alabama joined the union as a slave state, giving the country eleven slave states and eleven free. Missouri was to join the union that same year. Would it be slave or free? Northern members of Congress refused to admit it as a slave state, but the southern states wanted slavery. The stalemate was broken by the Missouri Compromise (1820), which let Missouri be a slave state but banned slavery from other states north of Missouri’s southern border. Now the country was divided into two parts – the North, where slavery was illegal, and the South, where it was about to become even more deeply entrenched. Rice was being replaced by a new and demanding crop – cotton.
Slave owners and overseers had the power to make their slaves’ lives bearable or unbearable. Solomon Northup had both a cruel owner and a cruel overseer. When he was finally free, he described his life on a cotton plantation:
The day’s work over in the field, the baskets are “toted,” carried to the gin-house, where the cotton is weighed. No matter how fatigued and weary he may be – no matter how much he longs for sleep and rest – a slave never approaches the gin-house with his basket of cotton but with fear. If it falls short in weight – if he has not performed the full task appointed him, he knows that he must suffer.
Slaves who picked too little were whipped. Those who picked more than the expected amount could suffer too, because the owner would expect that larger weight the next day. Pity the poor slaves who did not meet that new quota, because they would be whipped. After the overseer weighed the cotton, the slaves’ work would continue:
This done, the labor of the day is not yet ended, by any means. Each one must then attend to his respective chores. One feeds the mules, another, the swine – another cuts the wood, and so forth; besides, the packing is all done by candle light. Finally, at a late hour, they reach the quarters, sleepy and overcome with the long day’s toil. Then a fire must be kindled in the cabin, the corn ground in the small hand-mill, and supper, and dinner for the next day in the field, prepared. All that is allowed them is corn and bacon, which is given out at the corncrib and smoke-house every Sunday morning. Each one receives, as his weekly allowance, three and a half pounds of bacon [about 1.5 kilos], and corn enough to make a peck [about 9 liters] of meal. That is all – no tea, coffee, sugar, and with the exception of a very scanty sprinkling now and then, no salt.
Slaves tried to ease one another’s burden whenever they could. A former slave in Virginia said his grandmother was so small that she could never pick enough cotton to meet the quota. The other slaves liked her, so they would put some of their cotton into her bucket to help her. Still, they could do only so much, and sometimes she came up short. “Grandma said that often she was whipped until she could barely grunt.”
KIDNAPPED FROM THE NORTH
There was so much money to be made from slave trading that any black was in danger of being looked at as a potential slave. Solomon Northup had been born free in New York State, but in 1841 two white men promised him a job, and he left his wife and children to go with them to Washington, D.C., for work. But there was no job – Northup had been kidnapped. The men sold him to traders who took him to Louisiana.
It was twelve long years before he found someone to help. A white carpenter from Canada who was working on the plantation mailed a letter from Northup to his friends back home. The letter was sent in mid-August and Northup waited anxiously all through the summer and fall, past Christmas, and into the new year. He had no way of knowing if his letter had reached its destination, if his friends would help, or even if they were still alive. Finally, Henry B. Northup, whose father had owned and then freed Solomon’s father, arrived in Louisiana with documents from the governor of New York and other authorities to prove that Northup was a free man.
Lightening the Burden
After exhausting workdays, slaves grasped at any chance to relax. Most masters didn’t want them to socialize on weeknights, when they thought they should be resting for the next day’s work. One Virginia owner said they should be forced to work hard or “they become restive, run about at night for want of exercise in the day, to pilfer, and visit, hear the news, etc. etc.” That didn’t suppress the slaves’ very human need for some pleasure. “Might whip us the next day,” said Charles Grandy, a former slave in Virginia, “but we done had our dance.”
Saturday night was a different matter, because there was no work on Sunday. Slaves could gather for singing and dancing to the music of instruments they made from objects they found – a sheep’s rib or cow’s jaw, a piece of iron, a hollow gourd, or horsehair, according to a former slave in Texas. “They’d take the buffalo horn and scrape it out to make the flute,” he said. Sometimes their owners provided food for them, but most of the time they just shared whatever they had.
On many plantations, slaves could choose their own activities on Sunday. The slaveholders may have hoped they would rest up for the workweek ahead, but many of them understood that they were more likely to get good workers if they gave the slaves some time to themselves. Some owners allowed visiting on neighboring plantations. William Wells Brown wrote that he and the other slaves spent Sundays hunting, fishing, and making brooms and baskets – but that changed when their master “got religion,” and required his slaves to attend family worship.
Reading and Religion
At first, most owners did not want their slaves to have any religion, and certainly not one they brought with them from Africa. But as years passed, it occurred to them that spoken instruction in the Christian faith would both control the slaves’ behavior and save their souls.
The owners may have thought religion would teach slaves obedience to their masters, but instead slaves found solace in biblical stories like Exodus, the tale of how Moses led the Hebrew slaves out of Egypt. A slave in Texas wrote that his owner did not like the slaves attending religious meetings, but they found a way to do so anyway. While they worked during the day, someone might start singing the song “Stealing Away to Jesus.” To the overseer that would be just another song, but it told the slaves that there would be a religious meeting that evening. They would meet out of view of the owners, and sing and pray all night.
Few owners wanted their slaves to learn to read, and many Southern states passed laws against teaching them. Reading anything – even the Bible – could give them dangerous new ideas. But the young slave Frederick Bailey was eager to learn to read, and his mistress was eager to teach him.
Hugh and Sophia Auld had brought Frederick to their Baltimore house to be a companion for their little son, Tommy. Sophia Auld liked to read the Bible to the children. Intrigued by the mystery of converting marks on a page to spoken words, Frederick plucked up the courage to ask her to teach him to read. He caught on quickly, learning to spell out words of three or four letters. Sophia was so proud of her young pupil that, when her husband stepped into the room, she showed off Frederick’s accomplishments to him. To her surprise, he was far from pleased, saying:
If he learns to read the Bible it will forever unfit him to be a slave. He should know nothing but the will of his master, and learn to obey it.… Learning will do him no good, … making him disconsolate and unhappy. If you teach him how to read, he’ll want to know to write, and this accomplished, he’ll be running away with himself.
This event changed Frederick’s life. If Auld was right and knowledge would make him unfit to be a slave, then he was determined to read. When he grew up, he escaped to the North under the name he chose for himself – Frederick Douglass – and became a fierce
opponent of slavery.
More Slave Resistance
The bloodiest slave revolt in United States history happened in Virginia in 1831. Nat Turner and six other slaves killed five whites at the plantation where he was enslaved. Turner believed he had a sign from God to lead the attack. “I saw white spirits and black spirits engaged in battle, and the sun darkened – thunder rolled in the heavens, and blood flowed in the streams,” he explained later, when he was in jail. Turner gained followers as he went from plantation to plantation, until approximately sixty of them had killed about sixty whites, mostly women and children. The state’s militia captured most of the slaves, but Turner hid out for sixty-eight days before he was caught and hanged.
The rebellion so terrorized whites that they went on rampages throughout the South to uncover other plots of rebellion, and to intimidate blacks so they would never again rise up in revolt. Free blacks as well as slaves were at the mercy of whites. Harriet Jacobs’s grandmother was free in North Carolina, but her home was searched, her letters were ripped up, her clothes were stolen, and her garden uprooted. Blacks who lived on the outskirts of town were in the most danger. A ragtag gang of whites, emboldened by a little power, would storm into their homes, scattering buckshot so that searchers could find it and claim it was proof that they were rebels. They whipped men, women, and children “till the blood stood in puddles at their feet,” Jacobs wrote.
For another two weeks the outrages continued, with beatings, searches, and arrests. The authorities had to keep a group of blacks in jail to protect them from the white mob until the capture of Nat Turner helped to quell the whites’ rage.
This print portrays several scenes from the Nat Turner rebellion. Turner said in his confession that a “Spirit” had inspired him to fulfill Christ’s prophecy that “the last shall be first, and the first last.” To him, this meant that the time had come when Christ would lift up the downtrodden slaves.
Photo Credit 9.7
Once again, rebellion resulted in stricter laws. In Virginia, blacks could no longer hold religious meetings at night unless they had written permission from their masters or overseers. New laws prohibited the teaching of reading and writing to slaves. In 1834, the state banned free blacks from entering Virginia, in case they stirred up trouble. Slave owners in Virginia had reason to worry. They might have defeated Nat Turner, but slaves would continue to fight for three more decades, in the North and in the South.
CHAPTER 10
CIVIL WAR, CIVIL RIGHTS: THE UNITED STATES
When David Walker was growing up in North Carolina at the end of the eighteenth century, he saw black slaves abused by their white masters. David was a free black man, and his anger toward slavery grew and grew, until he realized he would have to leave the South. “I cannot remain where I must hear slaves’ chains,” he said.
After he moved north, he published one of the most radical antislavery pamphlets written in America, An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World. Walker refused to accept anything less than immediate abolition. He said that America was “more our country than … the whites’ ” because “The greatest riches in all America have risen from our blood and tears.” Walker even praised the Haitian revolution (“the glory of blacks and terror of tyrants”) and warned Americans that the day would come when their own slaves would rise up, unless they were freed. His words frightened Southerners, who banned his pamphlet and set a price on his head. To get his words to the slaves, he smuggled copies to his fellow used-clothing dealers in the South.
By 1830, there were fewer than three thousand slaves living in the North, but life was far from easy for free blacks like David Walker. Some states passed laws denying black men the right to vote, others restricted where blacks could live. And as English, Scottish, and Irish immigrants began to arrive in America looking for work, they saw free blacks as rivals for jobs, and anti-black riots broke out.
Northern blacks fought back. They organized the Colored Convention Movement to fight against discrimination and slavery and founded America’s first black newspaper, Freedom’s Journal.
William Lloyd Garrison
One of the most famous antislavery publications, The Liberator, was the work of a white man, William Lloyd Garrison. He was America’s most important white abolitionist.
Early American abolitionists were split into two camps. One worked to set up a colony for blacks in Africa, and the other wanted to pass laws that would free slaves over time, on the model of the Northern states. Garrison didn’t like either idea. What’s more, he called the United States Constitution a “covenant with death,” because it permitted the capture of runaways and gave the South immense power in Congress. To make his point, Garrison burned a copy of the Constitution at an Independence Day speech in 1854. He even wanted the North to secede from the Union so it would not share the South’s guilt for holding slaves. “No Union with slaveholders” was his slogan. Garrison moved the abolition movement away from gradual emancipation and toward freeing slaves immediately.
Garrison founded the American Anti-Slavery Society and wrote its Declaration of Sentiments, which echoed the words of the Declaration of Independence, “all men are created equal.” He may have sounded like a firebrand, but he remained a firm pacifist. He wanted to end slavery by changing public opinion, not by violence.
Sixty abolitionists from New England, Pennsylvania, New York State, and Ohio attended the first meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. Most were religious and some, who were very rich, gave money to the movement. Quaker women soon formed their own group, the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. Three black delegates attended, and African Americans later formed their own societies.
Anti-Abolition Anger Erupts
The abolitionists paid agents to travel throughout the North, organize meetings, establish local antislavery societies, and speak publicly. In 1835 they launched the “great postal campaign,” mailing over a million antislavery pamphlets to ministers, elected officials, and newspapers. All this made supporters of slavery furious. In Charleston a mob broke into the post office, carted off the antislavery mail, and used it to start a bonfire to burn Garrison in effigy.
Even in the North abolitionists were persecuted. Those who were profiting from slavery, like owners of cotton mills, sometimes encouraged the violence. In Utica, New York, lawyers, politicians, merchants, and bankers, together with a crowd of workers, roughly broke up a state convention of abolitionists. In Boston, Garrison himself was dragged through the streets by a crowd. In Philadelphia, a mob became so disruptive during a speech by Southern abolitionist Angelina Grimké Weld that she challenged the protesters:
What is a mob? What would the breaking of every window be? Any evidence that we are wrong, or that slavery is a good and wholesome institution? What if the mob should burst in upon us, break up our meeting and commit violence upon our persons – would this be anything compared to what the slaves endure?
Weld was speaking on May 15, 1838, at the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women. The event was held at Pennsylvania Hall, a building constructed with funds raised by abolitionists and dedicated just the day before as a meeting place. Three thousand people, black and white, were there to hear her when a mob outside threw stones at the windows and tried to shout her down. Undaunted, Weld urged women, who could not yet vote, to run a petition campaign, as Englishwomen had done. At the end of her speech, whites and blacks left Pennsylvania Hall arm in arm to protect the black women against the rocks and insults awaiting them. The nervous mayor asked the organizers to ban black women from the next day’s meeting. When they refused, he locked the doors and announced to the mob outside that the meeting had been canceled.
Encouraged by this victory, the mob turned on the building with a vengeance, setting it on fire. When firefighters arrived, they protected only the buildings surrounding Pennsylvania Hall, not the hall itself. Any firefighters who tried to protect Pennsylvania Hall got hosed themselves.
Abolitionis
ts may not have found the welcome they had expected in the North, but they were certainly attracting publicity. This brought in more wealthy supporters, people who could help to pay for newspapers, speakers, education, lawyers, and conventions.
The publicity was working. Northerners blamed Southerners for the outbursts, and came to see the Northern way of life – which they thought was based on hard work and free labor – as superior to the pampered lives of Southern planters, whom they stereotyped as lazy and decadent.
Taking Slavery to Court
On September 6, 1839, two very different men met in a jail cell in New Haven, Connecticut: Cinqué, an African, and Lewis Tappan, the wealthy co-founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Tappan hoped that the case of Cinqué and forty-two other Africans awaiting trial for murder would force an American court to declare slavery illegal in the United States.
The Africans had been on board the cargo ship Amistad, towed into a Connecticut harbor a few days earlier. Two Spanish slave traders from the ship told a judge that the Africans were legally purchased Cuban slaves who had rebelled and killed the ship’s captain and cook. Abolitionists doubted the story. They believed that the Africans had been illegally enslaved and had acted in self-defense. Tappan formed the Friends of the Amistad Africans Committee.
Tappan learned that Cinqué was the son of one of the principal men of his village. He had been captured to repay a debt, and had then been sold to an African slave trader and resold to Portuguese traders. They had put him, along with several hundred other Africans, on a slave ship to Cuba.
Five Thousand Years of Slavery Page 14