by Ira Berlin
Like the traders, slaveowners in transit were also on the make, bartering old hands for new ones or selling men and women to finance yet other new ventures. Slaves sold along the way rarely remained in place for long and were often resold, thus reliving over and over the horrific protocols of the trade. With their bodies greased to hide blemishes and hair painted to disguise age, slaves found themselves repeatedly placed on the auction block to be poked, prodded, priced, and packed off—perhaps to be sold again. Resale came quickly for some. Others lingered just long enough to establish themselves and gain a degree of comfort with their new surroundings, only to be suddenly uprooted again by the death of their new owner, the settlement of an estate, or an owner’s whim. A few were held in a state of limbo, while speculators brokered the most profitable deal. For some black men and women, the auction block and the slave pen became a way of life as well as the symbol of their long ordeal. Many of those caught in the trade did not live to tell the tale. Some—grieving for their past and despairing for their future—took their own lives. Yet others fell when they could not maintain the feverish pace of the march.
Over time the regularization of the slave trade reduced some of the hazards of the long march. Slave traders standardized their routes and adopted new technologies. They relied more on flatboats, steamboats, and eventually railroads, improving the circumstances under which slaves were transferred if only to assure the safe delivery of a valuable commodity. By the 1830s, the great slave traders began to transfer slaves by oceangoing vessels, generally from Alexandria, Baltimore, or Norfolk to New Orleans, which emerged as the nation’s largest slave market. Moreover, while the large traders rationalized their operations, small-time, undercapitalized itinerants—scrambling through the backcountry districts and crossroad hamlets to make a few dollars—transported a large proportion of the slaves. Their underfunded operations increased the risk to the black men and women sold westward. Without a stable base and with few connections, they traveled a haphazard path, camping where they could and foraging for food as they might. When successful, such operations might propel these speculators into the ranks of the prosperous; they did just the opposite for slaves.22
The similarities between the international and the internal trade could not have been lost on anyone caught in the transit to the Deep South. Another similarity between the two is the fact that occasionally black men—like the so-called guardian slaves in the transatlantic voyage—were recruited to oversee other slaves. William Wells Brown, who escaped from slavery and became a leading abolitionist, worked for a slave trader during his captivity in Missouri, much as Denmark Vesey had labored for a slave captain. But the black men and women shipped by sea shared most directly the experiences with their African forebears. While transatlantic traders established factories along the coast of Africa, American slave traders built or rented pens, or “jails,” where slaves could be warehoused, inspected, rehabilitated, and auctioned, sometimes to consignment agents who served as middlemen in the expanding transcontinental enterprise. Although slave traders advertised these places as “commodious residences,” there was no disguising that they were hellholes. The close quarters and unsanitary conditions bred disease, occasionally of an epidemic nature.23 The rationalization of the slave trade may have reduced the slaves’ mortality rate, but it did nothing to mitigate the trade’s essential brutality.
Slaves, especially young women, found themselves subjected to all manner of sexual abuse. Traders prized light-skinned women or “fancy girls” for the high prices they fetched in New Orleans and other cities where they were forced to work as prostitutes. Traders also took advantage of these women, imposing themselves much as had the officers and sailors on the slave ships in an earlier era. Some in fact looked for young women precisely for that purpose and then boasted of their conquests. “[T]he slave pen,” wrote one former slave, “is only another name for a brothel.” As in the factories on the west coast of Africa, a few traders moved into settled, perhaps even loving, relationships with slave women. Richard Lumpkin, a Richmond slave trader, married one of his slaves and had their two daughters educated in the North. But relationships with black women and affection for their children did not change the dynamics of the slave trade.24
There were other similarities between the two Middle Passages. Like the journey across the Atlantic, movement to the interior was also extraordinarily lonely and dispiriting. Capturing the mournful character of one coffle, an observer characterized it as “a procession of men, women, and children resembling that of a funeral.” Indeed, with men and women dying or being sold and resold, slaves—step by step—were being severed from their most intimate human attachments. The despondency and despair that accompanied the first great migration became central features of the second as well. Surrendering to desperation, many deportees had difficulties establishing friendships or even maintaining old ones. After a while, some simply resigned themselves to their fate, turned inward, and became reclusive, trying to maintain their humanity in circumstances that denied it. Others exhibited a sort of manic glee—singing and laughing, perhaps a bit too loudly—to compensate for the cruel fate that had befallen them. “Amid all these distressing circumstances,” it was with just such a group of “cheerful and apparently happy creatures” that Abraham Lincoln shared a steamboat ride down the Mississippi. Unlike the slaves who Lincoln reported “danced, sung, cracked jokes, and played various games with cards,” others dropped into a deep depression and determined to march no further. Charles Ball, like Olaudah Equiano nearly a century earlier, “longed to die, and escape from the bonds of my tormentors.”25
But the searing experience also forged strong friendships, as the westward march was also a time for establishing new relationships. Occasionally, some fell in love and married, as did Judy and Nelson Davis, who were thrown together in a coffle moving from Virginia to Mississippi and had the good fortune of ending up on the same plantation. Others who shared the transcontinental trek formed bonds akin to those established by shipmates on the voyage across the Atlantic. Mutual trust became one of the bases of resistance, which began almost simultaneously with the march.26
The coffle—like the barracoons on the coast of Africa—was filled with rumor of revolt. While women and children marched unchained, traders—worried about insurrection—shackled the men together during transit and locked them tight when they stopped. But whatever the level of security and surveillance, it never was enough. Waiting for their first opportunity and calculating their chances carefully, a few slaves broke free and turned on their enslavers. Murder and mayhem made this second great migration almost as dangerous for slave traders as it was for slaves. While in-transit insurrections were both rare and rarely successful, the handful of slave traders maimed or killed by their captives was large enough for traders to manacle their captives and guard them carefully. The slaves’ occasional triumph—like the revolt aboard the Creole in 1841, in which slaves being shipped from Norfolk to New Orleans seized the ship and forced the captain to sail to the Bahamas—put every trader on guard. Far more common than revolt was flight. Slaves found it easier—and far less perilous—to slip into the night than to confront the heavily armed men who lorded over them.27
As with their ancestors’ forced transit from Africa, slaves had the greatest chance for escape while they were close to home. Knowing the terrain, the fugitives could find refuge in familiar surroundings. Relying upon kin and friends, they secured shelter and support. They also helped themselves by keeping a careful account of their own movement. Charles Ball endeavored through his whole journey, from the time he crossed the Rappahannock River, to make such observations about the country, the roads he traveled, and the towns he passed through as would enable him, at some future period, to find his way back to Maryland.28
Yet for even the most determined fugitives under the most favorable circumstances, freedom was a distant prospect. Successful flights were few, whether to the seeming safety of the North and Canada or to t
he anonymity of a nearby city. Moreover, since many fugitives simply wanted to return home—as did Ball—if only to say a last good-bye or make a final plea for life to remain as it had been, successful flight denied fugitives their primary goal, which was to recover their old lives, as they despaired severing their ties to home. Slave traders appreciated the slaves’ dilemma. They waited for runaways to reappear on the old homestead, seized them, and again began the southward journey.29
Countering the forces aligned against them, black men and women tried their best to preempt their sale and deportation, which would separate them from their place. When rumors surfaced that their absentee owner might sell them to Texas from their home in Missouri, slaves Susan and Ersey were quick to remind their owner that they had “become much attached to the place (our Husbands being here),” that they had “a great many friends in this place,” and that they could not “bear to go to Texas with a parcel of strangers.” But few slaves dared to presume that the power of either argument or supplication could counter their owners’ avarice. Instead, they headed for the woods. Some took their families into hiding, not only to protect them but also to disrupt their owners’ plans. Others, bolder still, confronted their owners directly. A Virginia slave informed his new owner that he might be sold but he would not stay sold. “Lewis says he will not live with me, but will runaway if I attempt to keep him,” declared the astounded slaveowner.30
If few slaves were so bold, even the most timorous were emboldened by the horrific implications of the sales from the place they called home. Ever so gingerly and with great trepidation, slaves approached their owners. The amalgam of heartfelt supplications and veiled threats—reminders of old loyalties and hints of future insubordination—occasionally had the desired effect. When his owner put him “on the block and sold him off,” one Virginia slave remembered that he “cried and cried till master’s brother told me to hush crying and he would get him tomorrow.” Eschewing such pleas, one slave mother, when threatened with separation from her newborn, “took the baby by its feet ... And with the baby’s head swinging downward, she vowed to smash its brains out before she’d leave it.” The master relented. Yet such reprieves were rarely permanent, for an owner’s death or financial reverses were forever putting slaves at risk for further trades.31
If their appeals were rejected, slaves tried other tacks. Attempting to save his son from being sold south, one slave father mobilized his resources and found a compliant white man to represent him at the public auction. But when the ruse was discovered, the slave trader rejected the deal, denouncing the hapless father for presuming to think he was “white.” Despite this frustrating instance, slaves never surrendered easily to the realities of the trade.32
Occasionally these last-minute appeals fell in the slaves’ favor. In a few places, custom allowed slaves to choose another master if their present owner placed them for sale. Susan and Ersey, for example, did not think there would “be the least difficulty in getting ourselves sold” locally, but they needed permission to find a new owner so they would “not serparate” from their kin. But others were not so confident. The grim news that they or some loved one would be put on the auction block created a panic as slaves scrambled to find a surrogate master or pleaded for someone to hire them while they accumulated enough to purchase freedom. Maria Perkins’s note alerting her husband to the fact that their son had been sold captures something of the desperation of a parent about to lose a child. “I want you to tell dr Hamelton and your master if either will buy me.... I don’t want a trader to get me.... I am quite heart sick.”33
When at last it became clear that nothing could be done to prevent deportation, slaves began preparations for their new life. Those who had accumulated property in household items, furniture, and barnyard animals distributed them to relatives and friends or sold them to provide a small cushion of cash to carry to their new homes.34 The transfer of material possessions was but one of the slaves’ concerns at this moment of high crisis. Friends and relatives had to be notified so they could say their last good-byes. “[W]ith much regret” as well as hopes that “if we Shall not meet in this world I hope to meet in heaven,” Arena Screven wrote his wife that he had been sold from Georgia to New Orleans, using a language so stiff that it could barely “Express the griffin.” That done, slave parents looked for someone who might play the role of fictive parent. Laura Clark recalled that her mother turned to a friend, Julie Powell, who was sold in the same parcel as Laura. “Momma said to old Julie, ‘Take kier of my baby Chile ... and if fen I never sees her no mo’ raise her for God.”’ Through the tears and the ritual exchange of gifts, slaves passed last-minute advice. Mementos that would represent the hopes of a lifetime had to be presented to the deportees.35
Indeed few slaves forgot the terrifying moment when they were taken from their loved ones and sold to a distant and yet unknown place. In reminiscences collected years later, the memory of sale had hardly faded. It was “a day I’ll never ferget,” the elderly Mary Ferguson recalled in 1936, some seventy years after her sale. How could she, when, after her “crying’ an’ begin’ ” was dismissed, she was taken from her family. “I never never seed nor heared tell o’ my Ma an’ Paw, an’ bruthers, an’ susters from dat day to dis.”36 The shock that so distressed those who experienced the transatlantic passage haunted the victims of the second Middle Passage as well.
Still, black men and women looked for some ways to maintain connections as the places they had made their own were about to be taken away from them. If the transatlantic passage permanently severed the ties with family, friends, and country, the transcontinental passage left the hope, however slim, that those connections could be maintained. Slaves transported by their owners had the greatest possibility of success. Some appended notes on their owners’ correspondence with their own families. “I wish to let you know that I think of you often and wish to see you very bad,” Rose wrote from a caravan en route to Alabama via her mistress’s letter to North Carolina. Rose’s mistress-amanuensis confirmed she had “a great many Messages from the Servants,” although most were reported as little more than “all give their love to all their friends and their best service to Master and Mistress.” Such bland renditions of the slaves’ heartfelt sentiments encouraged those few slaves who could write to, as one put it, “tak my pen in hand.”37
Literate slaves maintained independent correspondence, and their messages had more bite. Phobia and Cash tried to keep in touch with their kin even as they were transported from Georgia to Louisiana. “Pleas tell my daughter Clarisse and Nancy a heap of how a do,” they wrote. Then they reminded Clarisse that her “affectionate mother and Father sends a heap of Love to you and your Husband and my Grand Children Phobia. Magi. & Cleo. John. Judy. Sue.” Phobia and Cash observed “that what [food] we have got to t[h]row away now it would be enough to furnish your Plantation for one Season.” But even the few literate slaves had difficulty maintaining ties half a continent away. Ten years after she arrived in Alabama from Virginia, Lucy finally found a way to communicate with her family. Most relied on bits of fugitive information of doubtful validity carried by planters and their wives returning from visits to the seaboard South.38
These connections and the occasional slaves who returned from their new abodes to their old plantations accompanying their owners or on a sanctioned visit provided slaves in the older slave states with some understanding of where they might be sent. To be sure, such fragments passed in whispered rumors were distorted, but they offered a sense of the world to which captives would be transferred. The presence of such knowledge distinguished the internal migration from the transatlantic one, where Africans had almost no knowledge of the Americas.
But for the vast majority of deportees, the stark reality was that the journey from the seaboard South to the interior, like the transatlantic passage, was a one-way trip. There would be no return, even for the briefest of visits, and there would be no correspondence, even of the most abbreviated messag
es. Indeed, there would be no news of any sort: nothing of a daughter’s marriage, a grandchild’s birth, a parent’s death. This second Middle Passage, like the first, permanently severed its victims from the life they had once known. Slaves literally could not go home. Interviewed in the 1930s, a former Virginia slave, like the millions caught in the transatlantic trade, “had two brothers sold away an’ ain’t never seen ‘em no mo ’til dis day.”39
But if they could not go home—and the number of migrants who reversed field and returned to their old homes was infinitesimal—the new arrivals remained intensely interested in and often deeply knowledgeable of their old homes. They renewed and refreshed knowledge of the seaboard and kept earlier arrivals alert to the people they had left behind. Small shards of information—news carried by new arrivals, gossip secured from their owners’ table—enlisted memories of the world they had lost but never surrendered. Indeed, the very inability of the migrants to return to their former homes fostered their demand to know more.40
Arriving at some dense forest or forbidding clearing, having experienced all the nightmares of the second Middle Passage, deportees rehearsed the experience of the first black arrivals to plantation America. In their topography and geography, flora and fauna, the black-belt prairie or the river bottoms of the great valleys looked nothing like the tidewater or piedmont of Virginia and the swamps of low-country South Carolina and Georgia. The new ecology disoriented the migrants, as they searched for the familiar amid the foreign. Rough frontier conditions, debilitating work regimes, and brutal treatment left men and women psychologically spent as well as physically exhausted. The mortality rate of slaves spiked and fertility rates dropped as the first generation of cotton or sugar cultivators—many barely older than children—confronted an often deadly disease environment.41