The extraordinary attention devoted to the fugitive issue between Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) gives the impression that it was a new phenomenon. But slaves have fled their owners throughout human history. In seventeenth-century Virginia and Maryland, Native American slaves found it easy to abscond, and planters then struggled to prevent African slaves from colluding and escaping with white indentured servants. By the eighteenth century, urbanization contributed to the problem, because cities like New York, as in medieval Europe, could provide refuge for slaves from the countryside as well as hiding places and supporters for urban slaves who had fled their owners. But, as in the Caribbean, it was wars—especially the French and Indian War and the American Revolution—that led to the large-scale exodus of slaves from their owners’ control. It is especially remarkable that the massive departure of slaves behind British lines in the Revolution—some were sold in British colonies; most were freed and sent to Nova Scotia and eventually Sierra Leone—did not lead to any longer-term weakening of the American slave system.24
Also in the eighteenth century, the first maroon communities took shape in unsettled and difficult-to-access regions in the South. These refuges for runaway slaves were never as large or strong as the maroon communities in Brazil and parts of the Caribbean. But in some bogs and wild areas of the Deep South, and the Great Dismal Swamp on the border shared by Virginia and North Carolina, fugitives founded communities that depended in part on raiding and trading with local plantations for food and supplies.25 Historian Steven Hahn has imaginatively argued that all of the free black communities, including those in the North and Midwest, were essentially maroon settlements made up by freed or escaped slaves and their descendants, whose identity and political orientation was defined by the national character of American slavery. This is part of a larger thesis that extends from the supposed political activism and resistance of slaves to the flight of tens of thousands of slaves behind Union lines during the Civil War, a kind of self-emancipation that Hahn terms “the greatest slave rebellion” in human history. Apart from the theory’s exaggerations and omissions, the maroon aspect provides an interesting perspective on the overall relationship between fugitives, free blacks, and slavery.26
As for slaveholders, their immediate loss was both economic and ideological. When one or more slaves absconded, there was an immediate loss of labor that could be difficult or impossible to replace. Hardly less important was the example set and the destabilization of discipline on plantations and small farms. Yet as we have seen, most runaways returned after a fairly short period, so there were strong incentives for masters to bargain for such a return when that was possible. The slaves who actually sought or achieved true freedom threatened a major loss of capital, which increased in the 1840s and 1850s as slave prices soared. Moreover, when a recaptured runaway was sold there could be a considerable loss in value if it became clear to buyers that the slave had left repeatedly or had headed north. On the other hand, the cost of retrieval amounted to a small percentage of the slave’s value. In the 1850s, when some average slave prices rose from $900 to $1,800, the cost of retrieval when successful never usually rose above $75. As we will see, Northern resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law could greatly increase the cost in some highly publicized individual cases. But in general, the most expensive expeditions after slaves—if the slave had a good head start—cost $150 to $200, even counting extensive hiring of slave catchers.27 Once again, the South clearly overreacted to the supposedly disastrous threat of the fugitive slave issue.
An important clue to the underlying reasons for this overreaction can be seen in the slaveholders’ psychological and ideological reaction to slaves’ running away, a reaction made explicit in thousands of printed advertisements for individual fugitives. Today, following a long but revolutionary shift in moral perception that has stigmatized slavery as a crime, it is very difficult to see the world through slaveholders’ eyes. One famous fugitive expressed the complexity it is so easy for us to miss: “The relation between master and slave is even as delicate as a skein of silk: it is liable to be entangled at any moment.”28 Convinced of the moral legitimacy of the system, most slave owners sincerely believed that their own best interests were identical with their slaves’ best interests, though most masters admitted that the institution, like any other, was capable of being abused. The desire for profit and personal power could be mitigated by the desire to be thought of, especially by fellow planters, as good Christians and decent fellows. Moreover, it made good economic sense to keep the slaves’ morale as high as possible and to encourage them to do willingly and even cheerfully the work they would be forced to do in the last resort. Like their Roman predecessors, Southern planters expected gratitude for their acts of kindness, indulgence, and generosity, and even for their restraint in inflicting physical punishment. Several travelers noted that American masters wanted above all to be “popular” with their slaves—a characteristically American need that was probably rare in Brazil or the Caribbean.29
While numerous ads for runaway slaves complain that the escape was triggered by too much generosity, confirming the adage “give-’em-an-inch-and-they’ll-take-a-mile,” many others reveal an almost pathetic faith that a given slave, who was said to have been very friendly and wanting to please, would accept an offer of forgiveness and “come home” like an errant son. Most masters desperately sought a consensual element, a sign of consent and gratitude on the part of at least some slaves. Ads and plantation records also reveal an overriding psychological response of anger.
Again and again, slave owners used the same word to describe runways: ungrateful. They had been treated well and humanely; they had been given proper food and clothing; they had been well housed and provided with other necessities; their families had been kept together. Yet, at the first opportunity they had set out on their own. They had neither honor nor gratitude; as a race, they were deceptive and deceitful.30
HARRIET JACOBS AS A FEMALE FUGITIVE
While the story of Harriet A. Jacobs exhibits some striking parallels with Frederick Douglass (whom she got to know in Rochester), more significant is what it reveals about the profound vulnerabilities of slave women and mothers and about the psychological obsessions of masters like Dr. James Norcom, who was determined to use his slaveholder powers as a means of obtaining some kind of “consensual” sex with the teenage Jacobs.31 Southerners continued to deny the key abolitionist claim that slaveholding led to the ubiquitous sexual exploitation of slave women. In response, abolitionists needed only to point to travelers’ accounts and to the growing ubiquity in the South of mulatto slave children. Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself was published in 1861 under the pen name “Linda Brent,” and was long thought to be the work of a white abolitionist, especially Lydia Maria Child, who edited the work but denied authorship. Even as a supposedly “inauthentic” slave narrative, Incidents became the most widely read and persuasive account of a fugitive slave woman’s struggle to maintain some control over her body, her children, and her human values. Thanks to the prodigious research of historian and biographer Jean Fagan Yellin, who has confirmed Jacobs’s authorship, we now even know the historical identity of the characters, such as Dr. Norcom (“Dr. Flint” in the narrative).32
Like Frederick Douglass, Jacobs was a very privileged slave, compared to the mass of field hands—but, given her situation, she was even more miserable than Douglass. Both of these slaves had happy early childhoods, lost contact with mothers, and became close to grandmothers. Harriet’s first owner, Margaret Horniblow, taught her to read and write. Both slaves were sent to plantations as a kind of punishment and both overcame their masters’ efforts to break their rebellious spirits. Both attempted in different ways to escape—Harriet by hiding for seven years in a cramped space not far from her master—and both succeeded in reaching free soil in the Nor
th, in changing their names, and in avoiding recapture until supporters actually purchased their freedom.33
Jacobs was born a slave in North Carolina in 1813 (five years before Douglass). At age twelve, upon the death of Margaret Horniblow, she became the property of Horniblow’s three-year-old niece—Dr. James Norcom’s daughter. Before long, Jacobs attracted the libido of Norcom, who became her de facto master. Jacobs was as determined to resist his sexual advances, originally in the form of notes and whispers, as Douglass had been determined to resist Edward Covey’s assault upon his manhood. Norcom’s wife, Mary, became intensely jealous of Jacobs’s hold on her husband’s sexual attention, and Jacobs would awaken in the middle of the night to find Mrs. Norcom leaning over the bed to make sure her husband was not there. Because Mary Norcom was so eager to get Jacobs out of the house, she was able to move and live with her nearby grandmother, who had been freed and had purchased a house thanks to her sales of prepared foods.34
As Norcom’s sexual advances continued, Jacobs concluded at age fifteen or sixteen that the only way to prevent an inevitable end to these solicitations would be to agree to an affair with a friendly and eminent local lawyer, later a U.S. Congressman, Samuel Tredwell Sawyer.
I knew nothing would enrage Dr. Flint [Norcom] so much as to know that I favored another; and it was something to triumph over my tyrant even in that small way. I thought he would revenge himself by selling me, and I was sure my friend, Mr. Sands [Sawyer’s pseudonym] would buy me.35
Jacobs’s affair with Sawyer led to the birth of two children, Joseph and Louisa Matilda. Sawyer eventually purchased both, as well as Jacobs’s younger brother, John S. Jacobs, and allowed all three to continue living with Jacobs’s grandmother. But while Sawyer was of much help in enabling Jacobs to have contact with her children and free herself from Norcom, the affair caused her to struggle with a sense of guilt, given her religious commitment to Victorian standards of female morality, which she answered with the claim that slave women must be judged by a different set of moral standards. Her editor, Lydia Maria Child, realized that the sexual content of Incidents might offend Victorian sensibilities and defended lifting the “veil” “for the sake of my sisters in bondage, who are suffering wrongs so foul, that our ears are too delicate to listen to them.”36
Although Norcom was infuriated by the continuing affair, he was still obsessed with having sex with Jacobs, without actually raping her: “You are mine; and you shall be mine for life. There lives no human being that can take you out of slavery. I would have done it; but you rejected my kind offer.”37 Norcom finally issued a clear-cut ultimate demand: Jacobs could either live in a cottage as his concubine, with the promise that her children would be freed; or he would send her to his son’s plantation in Auburn, North Carolina, a place, she heard, “to break us all in to abject submission to our lot as slaves.”38 When Jacobs rejected the cottage, Norcom’s fury was too extreme to be printed: “ ‘Very well. Go to the plantation, and my curse go with you,’ he replied. ‘Your boy shall be put to work, and he shall soon be sold; and your girl shall bee [sic] raised for the purpose of selling well. Go your own ways!’ He left the room with curses, not to be repeated.”39
Jacobs was spared from field work on the plantation, but worked endless hours as a house maid for Norcom’s son’s new wife. Above all, she concluded that unless she took some drastic step, such as running away, Norcom would use the treatment of her children as a device for abusing her, even sending them to the plantation to be “broken” as slaves. If she did escape, she thought he might well sell Joseph and Louisa to their father, who might free them. As it happened, contrary to Norcom’s wishes, Sawyer did secretly purchase the children and her brother by means of a slave speculator, after she became a fugitive. But it took him a long time to free even his own children, perhaps because he feared that doing so would harm his political ambitions.40
Meanwhile, one midnight, Jacobs prayed to God for guidance and protection, jumped from a high window into the rain, and then, aided by her uncle, hid for some time in various local refuges, including a swamp, before moving to a cupboard or garret above her grandmother’s storehouse, seven feet wide and sloping down to a height of three feet, with a small trapdoor through which family members could give her food and other necessities. Incredibly, she lived in that cramped space, undetected, for seven years. Since she could stand up at one end of the garret, she bored holes in the cupboard for air and light, and was able to sew cloth and read the Bible and other works. Surrounded by mice and rats, she baked in the summer and had frostbite in the winter. Nevertheless, she considered this choice far better than the life of most slaves:
I was never cruelly over-worked; I was never lacerated with the whip from head to foot; I was never so beaten and bruised that I could not turn from one side to the other; I never had my heel-strings cut to prevent my running away; I was never chained to a log and forced to drag it about, while I toiled in the fields from morning till night; I was never branded with hot iron, or torn by bloodhounds. On the contrary, I had always been kindly treated, and tenderly cared for, until I came into the hands of Dr. Flint. I had never wished for freedom till then. But though my life in slavery was comparatively devoid of hardships, God pity the woman who is compelled to lead such a life!41
Predictably, the news of Jacobs’s disappearance infuriated Norcom, who advertised a reward of $100 for the apprehension and delivery of his “light mulatto” “Servant Girl HARRIET,” who “will probably appear, if abroad, tricked out in gay and fashionable finery.” Warning all persons “under the most rigorous penalties of the law” against harboring her or helping her escape, Norcom stressed that since “this girl absconded from the plantation of my son without any known cause or provocation, it is probable she designs to transport herself to the North.”42 Locally, he searched countless locations and terrorized her family and friends, even confining some of them in jail. Norcom now transferred his sexual obsession into an obsession for tracking down this rebellious fugitive and recovering his power as a master. In Yellin’s words, Norcom “angrily marshaled the entire resource of the slave power—sheriff, patrols, courts, and the press—to catch her.” He even traveled three times to New York City in search of his once-desired concubine and during the rest of his life (he died in 1850) pursued various schemes for her recapture.43
Samuel Tredwell Sawyer, who was elected to Congress in 1837 and married the next year, saw Jacobs in hiding and promised that he would free their children and try to get Jacobs sold to him. Communicating through her grandmother, Jacobs agreed that Louisa should be sent north to live with Sawyer’s cousin in Brooklyn, since Norcom was claiming that the sale of the children to the slave speculator was illegal.44
By 1842, Jacobs became convinced that she needed to get north in order to see Louisa and send for Joseph, in part because she feared that Louisa was being treated as a slave. After a friend told her grandmother about a ship she could board, she succeeded in fleeing to New York, receiving help on the way from the Vigilance Committee in Philadelphia. In New York she became a nurse to a prominent family and was able to spend time with Louisa, who, to her distress, had not been freed and was not being sent to school as promised.45
Jacobs’s life during the next years became extremely complicated, as a result of the continuing danger of her being apprehended, her relations with her children and brother, and her ties with her wealthy New York employer, the Willis family. Attempts to capture Jacobs, which led to moves between New York and Boston, even involved her legal owner, Norcom’s grown daughter and her husband, who traveled to the North in search of her (and eventually sold her, thanks to the Willis family’s intervention). Jacobs’s brother John S. (probably for “Sawyer”) ran away from Sawyer in 1838, served as a sailor for two years, and ended up in Boston and then Rochester as an abolitionist speaker. Jacobs and her children built a flourishing life in Boston and interacted closely with the black community there. But after tending Mary Stace Willis’s baby
daughter in New York, Jacobs retained close ties with that family. When Mary died in childbirth in 1845, her husband traveled to Boston and persuaded Jacobs to accompany him on a trip to England, to take care of the daughter as they visited his wife’s grieving family.46
In 1849, John S. Jacobs succeeded through his abolitionist contacts in obtaining his niece Louisa’s entrance as a “colored female” into the exclusive Young Ladies Domestic Seminary in Clinton, New York, and he prepared a move to Rochester and an itinerary with Frederick Douglass. Harriet Jacobs understandably chose to move to Rochester so that she could be nearer her daughter’s boarding school and could work with her brother on his new project of running the Anti-Slavery Reading Room, above the offices of Douglass’s new newspaper, the North Star. Since her brother was often away on lecture tours, Jacobs in effect ran the reading room. She lived with noted Quaker abolitionists, Amy and Isaac Post, and was surprised to find herself feeling at home with this white family. The Posts were pillars of the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society and strong supporters of the North Star and of Douglass’s challenge to school segregation. Amy Post had recently attended the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention and according to one historian, she and her circle “reshaped the landscape of female activism in Rochester.”47
Jacobs developed an intimate friendship with Amy Post, to whom she slowly and bit by bit confided her personal history as a slave. It was Amy Post, reinforced by Jacobs’s brother, who finally overcame Jacobs’s strong reluctance to contribute to the abolitionist cause by writing and publishing a full account of the “incidents” in her life as a slave. As Post later recalled, Jacobs could not think of divulging her secrets to strangers “when it was all she could do to sob them into her friend’s ear”: “Though impelled by a natural craving for human sympathy, she passed through a baptism of suffering, even in recounting her trials to me.… The burden of these memories lay heavily upon her spirit.”48
The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation Page 31