As this book was going to press, my friend Stephanie M. H. Camp passed away. She was a great historian of slavery, and in this book, she would see much that she had shaped. But to me, she was my older, wiser sister, always there for me when things were at their lowest ebb. I will miss her grace and her laughter as long as I live. I still hear her voice in the words that she wrote, and I see her in the inspiration she gave to so many others. To feel those things is its own kind of grace, sweet and painful, a left hand that holds me up in its palm.
This book would have remained forever entombed in my computer without Donnette’s unflagging support, enthusiasm, and love. Now it lives, because she helped breathe the spirit back into me.
Above all, the book is for my children Lillian and Ezra, who have known this story from before-times. In many ways it has made us. But stories change with each passing day. Now we are writing our own chapters.
ABBREVIATIONS
AHR
American Historical Review
AS
George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, 18 vols. (Westport, CT, 1971–1979)
ASAI
Theodore Weld, American Slavery As It Is (New York, 1839)
BD
Baptist Database, collected from Notarial Archives of New Orleans
BIELLER
Alonzo Snyder Papers, LLMVC
CAJ
Correspondence of Andrew Jackson, ed. John Spencer Bassett, 7 vols. (Washington, DC, 1926–1935)
CATTERALL
Helen T. Catterall, ed., Judicial Cases Concerning American Slavery and the Negro, 5 vols. (Washington, DC, 1926–1937)
CG
Washington Congressional Globe
CHSUS
Susan B. Carter, Scott Sigmund Gartner, Michael R. Haines, Alan L. Olmstead, Richard Sutch, and Gavin Wright, eds., Cambridge Historical Statistics of the U.S. (Cambridge, MA, 2006)
Duke
David M. Rubenstein Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
GHQ
Georgia Historical Quarterly
GSMD
God Struck Me Dead [vol. 19 of AS]
HALL
Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, ed., Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy, 1719–1820, www.ibiblio.org/laslave/, accessed January 6, 2014
HAY
Haywood Family Papers, SHC
HSUS
Historical Statistics of the United States: 1789–1945 (Washington, DC, 1949)
JAH
Journal of American History
JCC
John C. Calhoun, The Papers of John C. Calhoun, ed. Clyde Wilson, 28 vols. (Columbia, SC, 1959–2003)
JER
Journal of the Early Republic
JKP
James K. Polk Papers, Library of Congress
JQA
John Quincy Adams, Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, ed. Charles Francis Adams (Philadelphia, 1875–1877)
JRC
Jackson, Riddle, & Co. Papers, SHC
JSD
J. S. Devereux Papers
JSH
Journal of Southern History
LC
New Orleans Louisiana Courier / Courier de Louisiane
LG
New Orleans Louisiana Gazette
LINCOLN
Abraham Lincoln, Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy E. Basler, 9 vols. (New Brunswick, NJ, 1953)
LLMVC
Lower Louisiana and Mississippi Valley Collections, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge
MCLANE
Documents Relative to the Manufactures in the United States, transmitted to the House of Representatives by Secretary of the Treasury Louis McLane (Washington, DC, 1833)
MW
R. W. Clayton, ed., Mother Wit: The Ex-Slave Narratives of the Louisiana Writers’ Project (New York, 1990)
NA
National Archives
NOP
New Orleans Picayune
NOPL
New Orleans Public Library
NR
Niles Register
NSV
Benjamin Drew, ed., The Refugee: A North-Side View of Slavery (Reading, MA, 1855)
NYHS
New York Historical Society
NYPL
New York Public Library
PALF
Palfrey Family Papers, LLMVC
PCC
Cameron Family Papers, SHC
RASP
Records of Antebellum Southern Plantations, microfilm series collected from multiple archives. See: www.lexisnexis.com/academic/upa, accessed January 6, 2014
RCB
Rice C. Ballard Papers, SHC
SCPOA
St. Charles Parish Original Acts
SHC
Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
ST
John Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies (Baton Rouge, LA, 1977)
TASTD
Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, www.slavevoyages.org/tast/assessment/estimates.faces, accessed June 16, 2012
TP
Clarence E. Carter, ed., Territorial Papers of the United States, 26 vols. (Washington, DC, 1934–1975)
Tulane
Special Collections, Howard-Tilton Library, Tulane University
VHS
Virginia Historical Society
WCCC
William C. C. Claiborne, Official Letterbooks of W. C. C. Claiborne, ed. Dunbar Rowland, 6 vols. (Jackson, MS, 1917)
NOTES
INTRODUCTION. THE HEART: 1937
1. Robert F. Engs, Educating the Disfranchised and Disinherited: Samuel Chapman Armstrong and Hampton Institute, 1839–1893 (Knoxville, TN, 1999); Lorenzo Ivy: Charles L. Perdue Jr., Thomas E. Barden, and Robert K. Phillips, eds., Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-Slaves (Charlottesville, VA, 1976), 151–154; personal communications with Rev. Doyle Thomas, January 2012.
2. Stephen Small and Jennifer Eichstedt, Representations of Slavery: Race and Ideology in Southern Plantation Museums (Washington, DC, 2002); cf. Stephanie E. Yuhl, “Hidden in Plain Sight: Centering the Domestic Slave Trade in American Public History,” JSH 79, no. 3 (2013): 593–625.
3. Ralph Ellison, “Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity,” Shadow and Act (New York, 1964).
4. Many recent historians of slavery, preferring the published autobiographies, have discounted the WPA narratives. Systematic critiques of the use of such interviews include the following: John Blassingame, “Introduction,” in ST, xliii–lxii; Donna J. Spindel, “Assessing Memory: Twentieth-Century Slave Narratives Reconsidered,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 27 (1996): 247–261; Damian Alan Pargas, “The Gathering Storm: Slave Responses to the Threat of Interregional Migration in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Early American History 2, no. 3 (2012): 286–315. I find these critics less persuasive than those who argue that the twentieth-century narratives are extremely useful. The WPA narratives contain rich personal observation remembered by the interviewees themselves, which can be read carefully and successfully with an understanding of the interview dynamic. Just as importantly, the narratives also transmit collectively held stories that in some cases are even older than the interviewees. The latter reflect the culture, beliefs, and vernacular history of the enslaved—including concepts and beliefs that clearly predate and make their way into the nineteenth-century narratives. See Mia Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas About White People, 1830–1925 (New York, 2000), esp. 113–116; George Rawick, “General Introduction” to AS, S1, 11, xxxix; Edward E. Baptist, “‘Stol’ and Fetched Here’: Enslaved Migration, Ex-Slave Narratives, and Vernacular History,” in Edward E. Baptist and Stephanie M. H. Camp, eds., New Studies in the History of American Slavery (Athens, GA, 2006), 243–274. For links between vernacular storytelling by slaves and former slaves, on the one hand, and l
iterary production by African Americans, on the other, see William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865 (Urbana, IL, 1985), 274; Marion W. Starling, The Slave Narrative: Its Place in American History (Boston, 1981, repr. of 1946 diss.); Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, eds., The Slave’s Narrative (New York, 1985); Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York, 1988).
CHAPTER 1. FEET: 1783–1810
1. In this book, some of the vignettes told from the perspective of enslaved people incorporate not only the specific content of the historical documents cited, but also details from other sources, as is the custom with evocative history. By drawing upon a wide variety of sources, I attempt to provide a richer depiction of the landscape, work practices, and cultural practices of the time and a more intimate portrait of the enslaved African Americans whose experience is the center of this history. These sources include the testimony of other formerly enslaved people who went through virtually identical experiences. This particular story, for instance, is drawn from Charles Ball, Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball . . . (New York, 1837), but it was written in the light of dozens of other accounts, including descriptions of people’s reactions to coffles, descriptions of slavery in early nineteenth-century Piedmont North Carolina, reports of the family demography of enslaved people during the era of the early domestic slave trade, and enslaved people’s stories of their experience during the era of the domestic slave trade. All of these are cited copiously in the coming pages, but for firsthand accounts of enslaved people’s reactions to the slave trade, see Charity Austin, AS, 14.1 (NC), 59; Ben Johnson, AS, 14.1 (NC); Dave Lawson, AS, 15.2 (NC), 49; Lila Nichols, AS, 14.1 (NC), 147–150; Mary Hicks, AS, 14.1 (NC), 184; Josephine Smith, AS (NC); Alex Woods, AS, 15.2, (NC), 416–417; Jeremiah Loguen, The Rev. J. W. Loguen, As Slave and Free Man (Syracuse, 1859), 65–67; “Recollections of a Runaway Slave,” Emancipator, September 20, 1838; Isaac Williams, Aunt Sally: The Cross, the Way of Freedom (Cincinnati, 1858), 10–15; ASAI, 76; and, for rich documentation of enslavement and the domestic slave trade in the area of North Carolina through which Ball was driven in chains, see Tyre Glen Papers, Duke; Jarratt-Puryear Papers, Duke, and Isaac Jarratt Papers, SHC. Unless otherwise noted, italics, underlining, and boldface type within quotations are reproduced from the original.
2. Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975); Kathy Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill, NC, 1996); Lorena Walsh, Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit: Plantation Management in the Colonial Chesapeake, 1607–1763 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2010).
3. Again, a few starting points: Philip Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History (Cambridge, UK, 1990); Richard Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1972); Peter Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion (New York, 1973); Leonardo Marques, “The United States and the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the Americas, 1776–1867” (PhD diss., Emory University, 2013).
4. Robert Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 1740–1790 (Ithaca, NY, 1998), 270.
5. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1775–1820 (Ithaca, NY, 1975); Donald Robinson, Slavery in the Structure of American Politics, 1765–1820 (New York, 1970); Christine Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginning of the Bible Belt (New York, 1997); Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (New York, 1984 [Library of America]), 289.
6. Rachel Klein, Unification of a Slave State: The Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina Backcountry (Chapel Hill, NC, 1990); Richard Beeman, The Evolution of the Southern Backcountry (Philadelphia, 1984); Allan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of English Empire in the Colonial South (New Haven, CT, 2002); James Merrell, The Indians’ New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact Through the Era of Removal (Chapel Hill, NC, 1989).
7. John Filson, Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boone (Norwich, CT, 1786), and his Discovery, Settlement, and Present State of Kentucky (New York, 1793), 74; Daniel Blake Smith, “‘This Idea in Heaven’: Image and Reality on the Kentucky Frontier,” in Craig Thompson Friend, ed., The Buzzel About Kentuck: Settling the Promised Land (Lexington, KY, 1998), 78; Massachusetts Spy, January 27, 1785; Philadelphia Gazetteer, November 27, 1784; Ellen Eslinger, “The Shape of Slavery on the Kentucky Frontier,” Kentucky Historical Society Register 92 (1994): 1–23, esp. 4; Steven Aron, How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Borderland to Daniel Boone (Baltimore, 1996).
8. Thomas Hart to [N. Hart], August 3, 1780, “Shane Collection, No. 22”; Philadelphia Gazetteer, November 27, 1784, May 16, 1788; Massachusetts Spy, May 29, 1782; Connecticut Journal, November 4, 1789; New York Packet, October 22, 1789; New York Weekly, June 20, 1792; Philadelphia Advertiser, October 4, 1792; Norwich Western Register, May 20, 1794.
9. Abraham Lincoln to Jesse Lincoln, April 1, 1854, in LINCOLN, 2:217; cf. Richard L. Miller, Lincoln and His World: The Early Years (Mechanicsburg, PA, 2006), 5n17.
10. Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, NY, 1998); Arthur Zilversmit, The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North (Chicago, 1967); Eva Sheppard Wolf, Race and Liberty in the New Nation: Emancipation in Virginia from Jefferson to Nat Turner (Baton Rouge, LA, 2006); Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 288; cf. Annette Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (Charlottesville, VA, 1997).
11. Patricia Watlington, The Partisan Spirit: Kentucky Politics, 1779–1792 (New York, 1972), 17–18; Janet A. Riesman, “Money, Credit, and Federalist Political Economy,” in Richard Beeman, Stephen Botein, and Edward C. Carter II, eds., Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and American National Identity (Chapel Hill, NC, 1987), 128–161.
12. Peter Onuf, Statehood and Union: A History of the Northwest Ordinance (Bloomington, IN, 1987); Robinson, Slavery in American Politics, 379–380; Malcolm C. Rohrbough, Land- Office Business: The Settlement and Administration of American Public Lands (New York, 1968), 8–14.
13. David Libby, Slavery and Frontier Mississippi, 1720–1835 (Jackson, MS, 2004); Walter LaFeber, The American Age: United States Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad Since 1750 (New York, 1989), 30–31; Andrew R. L. Cayton, “‘Separate Interests’ and the Nation-State: The Washington Administration and the Origins of Regionalism in the Trans-Mississippi West,” JAH 79, no. 1 (1992): 39–67; Jefferson to Madison, April 25, 1784, Jefferson Papers: Digital Edition, ed. Barbara Oberg and J. Jefferson Looney, http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/founders/TSJN-01–07–02–0129 (accessed February 24, 2014).
14. Paul S. Finkelman, “Slavery and the Northwest Ordinance: A Study in Ambiguity,” JER 6, no. 4 (1986): 343–370.
15. Woody Holton, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (New York, 2007); Pauline Maier, Ratification: The People Debate Their Constitution, 1787–1789 (New York, 2010).
16. The Founders’ Constitution, ed. Philip Kurland and Ralph Lerner (Chicago, 1987), 3:280.
17. Founders’ Constitution, 3:279–281. Cf. George Van Cleve, A Slaveholders’ Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American Republic (Chicago, 2010).
18. Hazel Dicken-Garcia, To Western Woods: The Breckinridge Family Moves to Kentucky in 1793 (Rutherford, NJ, 1991); 177–178; CHSUS, 1: Aa3644–3744.
19. Aron, How the West Was Lost, 82–95; Frederika Teute, “Land, Liberty, and Labor in the Post-Revolutionary Era: Kentucky as the Promised Land” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1988), 102–130, 185, 227–275; Watlington, Partisan Spirit, 220–222; David Rice, Slavery Inconsistent with Justice and G
ood Policy; Proved by a Speech Delivered in the Convention, Held at Danville, Kentucky (Philadelphia, 1792); John Craig Hammond, Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion in the Early American West (Charlottesville, VA, 2007); John Craig Hammond, “Slavery, Settlement, and Empire: The Expansion and Growth of Slavery in the Interior of the North American Continent, 1770–1820,” JER 32, no. 2 (2012): 175–206.
20. Dicken-Garcia, To Western Woods, 177–178; Marion Nelson Winship, “Kentucky in the New Republic: A Study of Distance and Connection,” in Craig Thompson Friend, ed., Buzzel About Kentuck: Settling the Promised Land (Lexington, KY, 1998), 100–123; Gail S. Terry, “Sustaining the Bonds of Kinship in a Trans-Appalachian Migration: The Cabell-Breckinridge Slaves Move West,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 102 (1994): 455–476.
21. Francis Fedric, Slave Life in Virginia and Kentucky, Or, Fifty Years of Slavery . . . (London, 1853), 15.
22. Terry, “Sustaining the Bonds of Kinship,” 465–466.
23. Fedric, Slave Life, 15–17; Dicken-Garcia, To Western Woods, 116–118, 173; Daniel Drake, Pioneer Life in Kentucky: A Series of Reminiscential Letters (Cincinnati, 1870), 176–177.
24. Fedric, Slave Life, 16; Washington (PA) Herald of Liberty, September 2, 1799.
25. Stanley Harrold, Border War: Fighting over Slavery Before the Civil War (Chapel Hill, NC, 2010); Philadelphia Advertiser, February 17, 1792.
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