Five Thousand Years of Slavery

by Marjorie Gann

  In Havana, he and fifty-two other kidnapped Africans had been bought by the Spanish traders, who had shipped them on the Amistad to Porto Principe, Cuba, to be sold. The crew had treated the captives poorly, and when the captives had asked the cook what would happen to them, he had pantomimed being killed and eaten. That was when Cinqué and some of the others decided to rebel. Cinqué found a loose nail that he used to unlock his shackles and release his companions. They found sugar-cane knives and killed the captain and the cook. Cinqué then ordered the Spanish to sail the ship eastward, back to Africa. This they did during the day, but at night the crew steered north, which was how they ended up in Connecticut.

  This sketch was drawn while Cinqué (here called Joseph Cinquez) was awaiting trial in Connecticut. He told his fellow captives on board the Amistad: “I am resolved it is better to die than to be a white man’s slave.”

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  The case worked its way up all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Tappan’s committee managed to convince one of America’s most respected citizens, former president John Quincy Adams, to take the case. The captives’ lawyers had argued in the lower courts that the Africans were free because the slave trade was illegal under Spanish law, but Adams appealed to higher ideals. Justice was blind to color, he said, and this case had been tainted by “sympathy with the white, antipathy to the black” from the first. More important, “the moment you come to the Declaration of Independence, that every man has a right to life and liberty, an inalienable right, this case is decided,” he said. “I ask nothing more in behalf of these unfortunate men than this Declaration.” The Supreme Court agreed with the lower court that the Africans were not legally slaves. They had been kidnapped, and therefore had the right to free themselves by force.

  About two and a half years after being transported from their homes to Cuba, the freed Africans, together with five white missionaries and teachers, boarded a ship to Sierra Leone, where the abolitionists hoped to establish a mission. The Amistad case had brought abolitionists together and had rallied many Americans against slavery. But the courts had not found that slavery itself was illegal in America. The abolitionists would have to continue their campaign.

  Frederick Douglass

  Frederick Douglass – the Frederick who had defied his owner by teaching himself to read and write – escaped in 1838 and made his way to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he would be safer from slave catchers. There he met the abolitionists of the American Anti-Slavery Society, led by William Lloyd Garrison. When he first told his story at a meeting in 1841, “Flinty hearts were pierced and cold ones melted by his eloquence,” one delegate said.

  For four years Douglass worked with Garrison, lecturing about his life as a slave, until he published his autobiography, A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Now his identity was out and he was in danger of being recaptured. To avoid that fate, he left the United States on a speaking tour of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, where he met eminent writers like Hans Christian Andersen. For the first time in his life, Douglass was in a place where he experienced no racism: “I employ a cab – I am seated beside white people – I reach the hotel – I enter the same door – I am shown into the same parlor – I dine at the same table – and no one is offended.… When I go to church I am met by no upturned nose and scornful lip,” he wrote to Garrison.

  Although most of those who attended Frederick Douglass’s lectures opposed slavery, many shared the common racial prejudices of their time, and did not expect that a former slave could learn to make fine speeches. “They said I did not talk like a slave, look like a slave, or act like a slave,” Douglass later wrote.

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  Douglass returned to America a free man in more ways than one. He was literally free, after a group of British abolitionist sympathizers bought his freedom from his owner, ending his worries about being recaptured. He also felt free to cut his ties with Garrison and strike out on his own. He moved to Rochester, New York, where he gave blacks an independent voice by launching The North Star (later Frederick Douglass’s Paper), his own antislavery newspaper.

  Black abolitionists did not always see things the way Garrison and his followers did. They were often more practical and willing to compromise. Douglass had begun to look again at the American Constitution and, unlike Garrison, he thought it could be read in a way that guaranteed freedom for black Americans. While Garrison urged his followers not to vote, Douglass’s paper would sometimes give support to political parties. Until he died at age seventy-seven, in 1895, Frederick Douglass dedicated his life to his people, as one of America’s leading abolitionists and its most esteemed black leader of the nineteenth century.

  Sojourner Truth

  In 1851, a black woman strode to the pulpit of a church in Akron, Ohio, where churchmen were addressing black and white delegates to a women’s rights meeting. Listening to the speakers, she heard that men have a “superior intellect,” that Jesus was a man, and that “if God had desired the equality of woman, He would have given some token of His will through the birth, life, and death of the Savior.”

  When they had finished, the visitor, who called herself Sojourner Truth, made her way to the podium. The man who chaired the session later wrote that “every eye was fixed on this almost Amazon form, which stood nearly six feet high, head erect, and eyes piercing the upper air like one in a dream,” as she spoke these words:

  That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man – when I could get it – and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman?

  Sojourner Truth was born a slave in rural New York around 1797. Her name was then Isabella, and when she was ten years old she was auctioned away from her mother and her youngest brother. Over the years she married, had children, and was sold to a series of masters. In 1826, she escaped to freedom. By 1827, the state of New York effectively freed all its slaves. Isabella’s owner had sold away Isabella’s five-year-old son, Peter, who had ended up in slavery in Alabama. With courage and determination, Isabella sued in court and got Peter back. That was when she discovered how cruel Southern slavery was. Peter’s body was covered with sores and scars from his master’s beatings. “Sometimes I crawled under the stoop, mammy, the blood running all about me, and my back would stick to the boards,” he told her.

  Feminists of the twentieth century were inspired by Sojourner Truth’s fight for freedom, and by her stirring “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech. In 2009, the United States recognized her contribution to human rights when her sculpture became the first memorial to a black woman in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C.

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  Isabella became a traveling preacher with a new name, Sojourner Truth, saying that God had called on her to “sojourn,” or travel, from camp meeting to camp meeting, speaking the truth.

  In the 1860s, when North and South clashed in a bloody civil war, she worked for the National Freedmen’s Relief Association, helping freed slaves find jobs. She even met President Abraham Lincoln. After the war, she refused to be put off Washington’s streetcars, which were off limits to blacks, and continued to agitate for women’s rights. She even attempted to vote in the 1872 presidential election, to make her point. She never gave up.

  The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850

  Harriet Jacobs was a young slave in the home of Dr. James Norcom of North Carolina. When she became an attractive teenager, her master began to pay more and more unwelcome attention to her. She turned to a sympathetic older white man for protection; he gave her some support, but also fathered two children with her. Meanwhile, Norcom pursued Jacobs. Desperate to escape his advances
, she went into hiding. For seven years she lived in the crawl space of the house owned by her grandmother, a free woman. Through a tiny crack in the wall she could see her children play, but no one told them she was there. In 1842, when she was about twenty-nine years old, she no longer felt safe and escaped to New York City. When Norcom traveled north to find her, she fled to Boston. Ultimately she moved to Rochester, where she joined the abolitionist community. With the help of friends and her free grandmother, her children moved north as well.

  In 1850, any sense of security that a runaway slave in a free state might have enjoyed vanished. Congress passed a new law that let federal marshals demand help from any citizen in capturing a slave who had escaped to the North. The Fugitive Slave Act did not permit trials for those accused of being escaped slaves, did not require proof that the person was truly a runaway, and gave a reward to people who found a supposed runaway. This meant that any white could turn in any black person as a fugitive. Anyone who helped a runaway could be imprisioned as long as six months and fined up to $1,000. For Jacobs, this new law marked “the beginning of a reign of terror to the colored population.”

  BLACKS’ RIGHTS, WOMEN’S RIGHTS, HUMAN RIGHTS

  People who supported rights for blacks did not necessarily support rights for women. When William Lloyd Garrison attended the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London with his colleague Lucretia Mott, the London organization refused to seat the American women. In protest, Garrison walked out.

  Mott and another woman ejected from the London meeting, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, resolved then and there to organize a women’s rights conference in America. It took eight years, but in 1848 the First Women’s Rights Convention met in Seneca Falls, New York. Many of the organizers were abolitionists. Richard and Jane Hunt, for example, sheltered runaway slaves in their carriage house, and their factory produced wool cloth that people could buy to avoid using slave-made cotton.

  No longer safe in the United States, as many as twenty thousand blacks fled to Canada over the next ten years. There they would find a safe haven, because the Canadian government would not return them to slavery. In her book Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Jacobs wrote:

  Many families, who had lived in the city for twenty years, fled from it now. Many a poor washerwoman, who, by hard labor, had made herself a comfortable home, was obliged to sacrifice her furniture, bid a hurried farewell to friends, and seek her fortune among strangers in Canada. Many a wife discovered a secret she had never known before – that her husband was a fugitive, and must leave her to insure his own safety. Worse still, many a husband discovered that his wife had fled from slavery years ago, and as “the child follows the condition of its mother,” the children of his love were liable to be seized and carried into slavery. Everywhere, in those humbled homes there was consternation and anguish. But what cared the legislators of the “dominant race” for the blood they were crushing out of trampled hearts?

  Fleeing Slavery

  Canada had been a destination for slaves since Upper Canada (today’s Ontario) became the first British colony to have a law restricting slavery. The Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery was passed in 1793 at the urging of the lieutenant governor, John Graves Simcoe. He couldn’t get a bill for immediate abolition passed, because some Loyalist members of his executive council were slaveholders, but his act freed the children of current slaves once they reached the age of twenty-five and stated that their children would be born free. When black troops who had joined the British forces during the War of 1812 were rewarded with land, Canada’s black population grew. By the 1830s, there were black settlements in Southern Ontario waiting to welcome the fugitives.

  One June afternoon in 1833, an angry crowd of black people armed with pistols, knives, and even swords gathered outside a Detroit jail. Thornton Blackburn, a fugitive slave from Kentucky, was brought out of the jail in shackles. He had been living in Detroit peacefully with his wife, Lucie, when they were both arrested as runaways. He asked to speak to the crowd, and when he stepped forward, someone tossed a pistol to him. He fired it in the air. With that, the crowd surged forward, grabbing Blackburn. Pursued by a posse, bugles blaring and fire bells clanging, they spirited him away to the Rouge River in a cart owned by an elderly black man and pulled by his blind horse. A boat was waiting, but the boatman stalled until one of the rescuers bribed him with a gold watch. Then he ferried the runaway across the river to Upper Canada.

  The Sunday before, two black women, Mrs. Lightfoot and Mrs. French, had asked the jailer for permission to pray with Lucie Blackburn. That evening, according to an account written at the time, they made their “sorrowful departure, tears falling like rain,” their faces covered with handkerchiefs. It was only the next day that the jailer discovered Mrs. French sitting in Lucie’s cell in Lucie’s clothes! Meanwhile, Lucie had escaped.

  Safely across the border, the Blackburns were reunited. They moved to Toronto, where they established the city’s first cab service and helped other fugitive slaves settle. For her part in Lucie’s escape, Mrs. Lightfoot was fined twenty-five dollars, and Mrs. French moved to Upper Canada to avoid trouble with the law.

  THE BOOK THAT CHANGED HISTORY

  Nineteenth-century readers were gripped by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and wept over the slave Eliza’s desperate fear of losing her baby: “[H]e was all I had … and, ma’am, they were going to take him away from me – to sell him – sell him down south, ma’am, to go all alone – a baby that had never been away from his mother in his life!”

  Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the blockbuster of the century. Published in 1852, it sold 10,000 copies in the first seven days, 100,000 before midsummer, and 300,000 before the end of the year. So high was the demand that it kept three paper mills at work, and three power presses running twenty-four hours a day. Overseas sales were astronomical; more than a million and a half copies flew off the shelves in England, and the book was translated into sixteen languages by the time the American Civil War broke out in 1861. Eliza’s story did much to convince Northerners that Southern slavery had to end. It is said that President Lincoln greeted Harriet Beecher Stowe during the American Civil War with the words “So this is the little lady who started this great big war.”

  The products based on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel were endless. You could eat off Uncle Tom’s Cabin dishes, sing Uncle Tom’s Cabin songs, go to Uncle Tom’s Cabin plays, and even put together this Uncle Tom’s Cabin jigsaw puzzle.

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  The Underground Railroad

  Many slaves who found their way to Canada did so with the help of the “Underground Railroad.” There was no actual railroad; it was a secret network of brave people, both black and white. Those who helped fugitives were called “conductors,” the routes were “rails,” safe houses where runaways could hide along the way were “stations,” and the runaways were “cargo” or “freight.” Some conductors were members of organized groups, but others, mostly black, simply helped runaways who turned up. Slaves were more likely to trust a black stranger not to betray them.

  One black conductor was John Parker, a foundry owner from Ripley, Ohio, who rowed runaways from Kentucky across the Ohio River. One of Parker’s white employees was the son of a Kentucky plantation owner, and he challenged Parker to free any of his father’s slaves. Parker took the dare and made his way to the slave quarters, where he met a couple who wanted to flee. It would not be easy; the master kept a lit candle and a loaded pistol beside him, and the slaves’ child slept at the foot of his bed. Parker crept into the master’s bedroom, grabbed the baby, deliberately knocked over the candle and pistol, and ran. When the escapees were halfway across the river they heard gunshots, but they made it across and safely into the hands of another conductor before their master arrived in Ohio.

  Levi and Catharine Coffin were white conductors in Newport, Indiana, who helped an estimated three thousand slaves to freedom. In his Reminiscences, Coffin recalls how th
e traffic through his station grew over time:

  In the winter of 1826–27, fugitives began to come to our house, and as it became more widely known on different routes that the slaves fleeing from bondage would find a welcome and shelter at our house, and be forwarded safely on their journey, the number increased.… I found it necessary to keep a team and a wagon always at command, to convey the fugitive slaves on their journey.… These journeys had to be made at night, often through deep mud and bad roads.… Every precaution to evade pursuit had to be used, as the hunters were often on the track, and sometimes ahead of the slaves.

  Escaping from slavery took daring and cleverness, but Henry “Box” Brown’s plan was perhaps the most ingenious of all. In 1851, with the help of a storekeeper in Richmond, Virginia, Brown had himself shipped in a crate to friends in Philadelphia. Tossed from wagon to baggage cart to steamer, sometimes upside down, he survived and arrived, he later wrote, “a free-man, but … too weak, by reason of long confinement in that box, to be able to stand, so immediately swooned away.”

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  Harriet Tubman

  One conductor became known as the “Moses of her people” because, like Moses in the Bible, she guided so many slaves to freedom. When she heard that she was about to be sold, Harriet Tubman escaped slavery in Maryland in 1849. A sympathetic white woman directed her to a safe house and gave her the names of two other people who would help her. Runaways, who rarely had maps and usually couldn’t read signposts, fled under cover of darkness. They counted on the North Star to steer them in the right direction. Using it as her guide, Tubman arrived at last in Philadelphia.