Bound for Canaan

by Fergus Bordewich

  In due course, all the remaining Hensons—Josiah’s three sisters, two brothers, his mother, and himself—were put up at auction. The memory of this event remained engraved in Josiah’s memory until the end of his life: the huddled group of anxious slaves, the crowd of bidders, the clinical examining of muscles and teeth, his mother’s raw fear. His brothers and sisters were bid off one by one, while his mother, holding his hand, looked on in “an agony of grief,” whose meaning only slowly dawned on the little boy as the sale proceeded. When his mother’s turn came, she was bought by a farmer named Isaac Riley, of Montgomery County, just outside the site of the new national capital at Washington. Then young Henson himself was finally offered up for sale. In the midst of the bidding, as Josiah remembered it, his mother pushed through the crowd, flung herself at Riley’s feet, and begged him to buy the boy as well. Instead, he shoved her away in disgust.

  Henson was bought by Riley’s neighbor Adam Robb, who kept a tavern at the site of present-day Rockville, then just a country crossroad. “He took me to his home, about forty miles distant, and put me into his negro quarters with about forty others, of all ages, colors, and conditions, all strangers to me,” Henson recalled. “Of course nobody cared for me. The slaves were brutalized by this degradation, and had no sympathy for me. I soon fell sick, and lay for some days almost dead on the ground. Sometimes a slave would give me a piece of corn bread or a bit of herring.” Robb, annoyed at being burdened with a useless slave, offered to sell the boy cut-rate to Riley. The planter agreed, although, as Henson would put it, he made clear that he didn’t want to be stuck with “a dead nigger,” and promised to pay Robb a small sum for him in horseshoeing only if Josiah lived.

  Isaac Riley, who was to shape the remainder of Henson’s life in slavery, was probably only about twenty years old when he took ownership of him. Isaac Riley’s father, Hugh Riley, was one of the largest land and slave owners in Montgomery County. Isaac would inherit from him, and from his sisters, about four hundred acres of farmland mostly in present-day Bethesda, along with three tobacco houses, around twenty slaves, and at least one lot in George Town, as it was then written. “The natural tendency of slavery is to convert the master into a tyrant, and the slave into the cringing, treacherous, false, and thieving victim of tyranny,” Henson opined. “Riley and his slaves were no exception to the general rule.” Like most of Montgomery County at the turn of the nineteenth century, the gently rolling, lightly wooded hills of Isaac Riley’s farm were planted mainly with wheat and other food crops, as well as tobacco, as the continuing presence of the drying sheds on the county tax rolls indicates. Nearly every farm in the county, probably including Riley’s, also had a flock between six and twenty sheep, three or four dairy cows, and a dozen or so hogs. Farmers hauled grain to one of the local grist mills to get flour and corn meal custom ground, and shipped bushels of it to George Town; and to Washington, then still hardly more than a sprawling construction site; and even as far away as Baltimore.

  Isaac Riley, according to Henson, was “vulgar in his habits, unprincipled and cruel in his general deportment.” In the autobiography that he produced years later, with the assistance of a Boston abolitionist, for a primarily white, religious, Victorian audience, Henson was circumspect when referring to sex. But when he spoke of Riley’s addiction to “the vice of licentiousness,” he was probably referring to a propensity for sexually exploiting his female slaves. Henson’s mother might well have been one of them. Henson never explicitly said so, but in spite of his evident attachment to his mother, she dropped completely out of his narrative after their purchase by Riley. Once again under her care, however, the boy, who was suffering as much from shock as from physical illness, rapidly recovered. His earliest jobs were carrying buckets of water to the older men at work in the fields, holding a horseplow for weeding between rows of corn and, when he grew taller, taking care of Riley’s saddle horse. Eventually he was put to hoeing in the fields. Notwithstanding a staple diet mainly of corn meal and salt herring, he grew up to be an uncommonly robust boy, and a natural leader among Riley’s slaves.

  Henson would eventually become one of the most famous fugitive slaves of all, and one of the best-known African Americans of his time. He would become a conductor on the Underground Railroad, help found a community for refugee slaves in Canada, and travel to Europe, where he would even be introduced to Queen Victoria. But all that lay far in the future. Indeed, the small, terrified boy who stood transfixed by his father’s torture and humiliation really had no future at all, to speak of. No future, that is, except the illiteracy, ignorance, and impotence that were the lot of the vast majority of slaves, unending days of toil, and the omnipresent threat of sudden, savage punishment. The lesson of loyalty was not lost on him. As he grew, Henson would craft himself into the ideal slave, a paradigm of loyalty, ever trusting and ever trusted, beyond reproach and therefore, he hoped, beyond punishment. He would never give a master cause for the kind of cruelty that his father had suffered, nor for selling him away to the unknown lands to the west, from which it was said that no slave returned.

  2

  North American slavery was born in the moist, flat tidewater country along Chesapeake Bay, and the lower Delaware, James, and Rappahannock rivers, where tobacco growing first made English settlement profitable. The first twenty African slaves were sold to the settlers at Jamestown, in 1619, by the captain of an errant Portuguese trading vessel. However, colonists continued to farm their ever-expanding plantations with an indiscriminate assortment of enslaved Indians from the dwindling coastal tribes, and indentured white laborers, as well as black Africans. The whites sold themselves (or were kidnapped) into what was, in effect, contract slavery in return for passage to America; although they were subject to the same restrictions and punishments as nonwhites, and could be resold during their term of servitude, they eventually had to be freed. The Indians died in staggering numbers from imported diseases that wiped out eighty percent or more of entire native communities. Gradually, the balance shifted toward the almost exclusive exploitation of black Africans. Slaves, unlike indentured whites, steadily continued to multiply their master’s wealth, like well-invested money. And a slave, once “tamed” and trained to cultivate the crop that was the economic engine of the mid-Atlantic colonies, was a human tool that would last for decades. It was also, of course, harder for black slaves to slip away unnoticed and disappear into the free white population.

  As tobacco production expanded from twenty thousand pounds in 1619 to thirty-eight million pounds in 1700, and then tripled again by the end of the eighteenth century, the demand for slave labor steadily grew. Between 1680 and 1750, the number of black slaves increased from about 7 percent to 44 percent of the population in Virginia and from 17 percent to 61 percent in South Carolina, where rice-growing in the coastal counties also lent itself to plantation economics. Slavery was by no means confined to the South. The number of black slaves in Connecticut grew from thirty in 1680 to fifteen hundred in 1715, and eventually to more than sixty-five hundred on the threshold of the Revolution. “The Negro Business is a great object with us,” Joseph Clay of Savannah, Georgia, wrote, in 1784. “It is to the Trade of the Country as the Soul to the Body.”

  To be sure, commercial trade in all kinds of human beings was commonplace in seventeenth-century England. Bristol, London, and other ports exported large numbers of white indentured servants and prisoners of war. In 1652, for instance, 270 Scots who had been captured at the battle of Dunbar were put on the market and sold in Boston. Shipping kidnapped children and adults was also a thriving business. In 1617, a single agent, one William Thiene, exported 840 people, and in 1668 there were three ships at anchor in the Thames full of kidnapped children. By the end of the century, however, all other forms of the commerce in human flesh were dwarfed by the African trade. Between 1680 and 1700 alone, three hundred thousand slaves were shipped westward to the Americas in English vessels alone.

  Slaves came in many varieties, a
nd were marketed accordingly. Buyers in British America preferred sinewy and durable Fantis and Ashantis from the Gold Coast. The French, given a choice, tended to favor Dahomans. A reputed disposition to suicide undercut the export value of Ibos and Efiks. Naturally “genteel and courteous” Senegambians were widely sought after for indoor work, while Mandingos were credited with exceptional skill at manual crafts, like barrel making and smithery. Angolans were alleged to be endemically lazy, and so commanded the lowest prices of all.

  In Africa, slaves might be acquired in any one of several ways. Some were born into slavery, or sold into it by their own kings for imported commodities like weapons, factory-made textiles, and glassware. Some were captives of war, and others were kidnapped from their homes by roving bands of native slave hunters. Sometimes entire villages were surrounded and marched or carried by river to the coast. Still others were bred specifically for export by coastal traders. At the coast, slaves were processed for sale through established depots, or “factories,” operated by one or another European trading company, or in some cases native Africans, or sold directly to foreign ships engaged in the trade. Olaudah Equiano, the son of a slave-owning tribal elder, was kidnapped as a child from his home in eastern Nigeria by slave hunters sometime in the 1750s. As the servant of a British naval officer, he eventually learned English and became one of the earliest slaves to recount his experiences in print, in his 1792 autobiography. His first sight of European slave traders aboard a ship terrified him beyond words. “I was immediately handled and tossed up to see if I was sound, by some of the crew; and I was now persuaded that I had got into a world of bad spirits, and that they were going to kill me.”

  The slave trade could be immensely profitable. One slave ship, the Hawke, carried three thousand British pounds of goods to West Africa in January 1779, where they were traded for an unspecified number of slaves, of whom 386 survived to be sold for more than seventeen thousand pounds in America, earning the owners a profit of more than seven thousand pounds. Massive profits from the slave trade fueled England’s eighteenth-century Industrial Revolution. An early economist described the trade as “the first principle and foundation of all the rest, mainspring of the machine which sets every wheel in motion,” generating capital that its wealthy investors in turn reinvested in mills, foundries, coal mines, quarries, canals, and other innovations, including James Watt’s first steam engine.

  By the time of the American Revolution, about two thousand American and British ships were engaged in transporting between forty thousand and fifty thousand Africans to the Americas every year. Although Thomas Jefferson, in an early draft of the Declaration of Independence, disingenuously blamed the slave trade on the king of England, the North American colonies were deeply implicated in it as well. Slave ships sailing from Charleston and Savannah, and from northern ports such as New York and Boston, generated huge profits trading cargoes of New England rum for slaves in Africa, typically at a rate of two hundred gallons per slave. Ships’ captains were usually paid with a percentage of the cargo. “For every Hundred and four slaves In the West Indies or Where ever sold, you are to have four,” one Yankee skipper was informed by his employers. Profits from sale of the slaves would be invested partly in West Indian molasses, which would be carried back to New England, to be distilled into more rum. When Parliament attempted to tax imported molasses in 1763, outraged Massachusetts merchants protested that it would ruin the slave trade. Such “taxation without representation” fanned already smoldering colonial resentment toward the Crown, contributing to revolution little more than a decade later.

  No colony, or state, surpassed Rhode Island in its involvement in the transatlantic trade. Between 1725 and 1807, more than nine hundred Rhode Island ships sailed to the west coast of Africa, to bring an estimated 106,000 slaves back across the ocean to the Americas. Ships owned by merchants in just the three towns of Providence, Newport, and Bristol accounted for more than 60 percent of slaving voyages during that period, earning profits for investors from all levels of society, including the Brown family of Providence, the founders of Brown University. (Brown was not alone in benefiting from the slave trade: Harvard Law School’s first endowed professorship, the Isaac Royall Chair, was financed with money from Royall’s slave plantation on the island of Antigua, while Yale’s first endowed professorship honored Philip Livingston, a slave trader.) Yankee merchants treated it as a trade like any other. “We left Anamaboe ye 8th of May, with most of our people and slaves sick,” Captain George Scott wrote to his Newport investors, in 1740, from the coast of West Africa. “We have lost 29 slaves. Our purchase was 129. We have five that swell’d and how it will be with them I can’t tell. We have one-third of dry cargo left and two hhds. rum. I have repented a hundred times ye buying of them dry goods. Had we laid out two thousand pound in rum, bread and flour, it would purchased more in value than all our dry goods.”

  On board ship, slaves were essentially stowed like any other commodity. Even in the better ships, conditions were horrific. Slaves were typically packed together so tightly in the hold that they could not move. In the “best regulated” ships, a grown person was allowed sixteen inches in width, thirty-two inches in height, and five feet eleven inches in length, or as was often said, “not so much room as a man has in a coffin.” Men were generally confined two and two together either by the neck, leg, or arm, with iron fetters, sitting cross-legged in rows, back to back. In most ships, the slaves were crammed so tightly that it was impossible to walk among them without stepping on human flesh. The Reverend John Newton, a reformed slave captain—and composer of the hymn “Amazing Grace”—wrote that the slaves lay “close to each other, like books upon a shelf: I have known them so close that the shelf would not easily contain one more. The poor creatures, thus cramped, are likewise in irons for the most part which makes it difficult for them to turn or move or attempt to rise or lie down, without hurting themselves or each other.” In the daytime, they were usually brought up at least briefly for air. It was not uncommon, at such moments, for despairing slaves to jump overboard to their deaths, in shackled pairs.

  Olaudah Equiano, who was transported to the West Indies after his kidnapping in West Africa, remembered the voyage as a weeks-long nightmare of unremitting terror and excruciating discomfort. The stench of the hold was almost unbearable. “The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, being so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died…This deplorable situation was aggravated by the galling of the chains, now become insupportable; and the filth of necessary tubs, into which the children often fell, and were almost suffocated. The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered it a scene of horror almost inconceivable.”

  Normal mortality during voyages was often as high as 25 percent. A similar proportion commonly died from illness, exposure, and shock before they were actually brought to sale, or during the so-called seasoning process, by which slaves were acclimated to their life and work in America, so that the total loss from any given voyage approached 50 percent. If there was an emergency at sea, slaves were simply “jettisoned” like any other cargo, that is, thrown alive into the sea to drown. In one case, in 1781, the British-owned Zong set sail with 440 slaves, and a crew of 17. After two and a half months at sea, during which both the slaves and crew were decimated by rampant dysentery, the captain explained that if the slaves died of thirst or illness, the loss would fall on the owners of the vessel, but if they were thrown into the sea, it would be a legal jettison, covered by insurance. One hundred and thirty-two slaves were deemed too sick and not likely to live and were simply swung into the sea by their handcuffs. The ship’s owners later claimed thirty pounds of insurance money for each. (The underwriters refused to pay, and the suit went to court, where it
went against the ship’s owners; it was the first case in which an English court ruled that a cargo of slaves could not be treated simply as merchandise.)

  During the entire span of the transatlantic slave trade, the vast majority of slaves, perhaps as much as 85 percent, were taken to Brazil, the various European colonies in the Caribbean, and Spanish South America. The British colonies of North America and the United States imported only about 6 percent of the between ten and eleven million slaves that were brought from Africa. More than 40 percent of all slaves sold in North America were imported through Charleston, South Carolina. New shipments were advertised like any other commodity. One poetically inclined auctioneer proclaimed in the South Carolina State Gazette, in September 1784:

  Abraham Seixes,

  All so gracious,

  Once again does offer

  His services pure

  For to secure

  Money in the coffer.

  He has for sale

  Some negroes, male,

  Will suit full well grooms

  He has likewise

  Some of their wives

  Can make-clean, dirty rooms.

  For planting too,

  He has a few

  To sell, all for the cash,

  Of various price,

  To work the rice,

  Or bring them to the lash.

  Slave sales of course existed in every major city. William Wells Brown, who escaped to the North in 1834, worked for a time as an assistant to a slave speculator, or “soul driver,” who made periodic trips down the Mississippi River with consignments of slaves to sell in the markets of New Orleans. Part of Brown’s job was to prepare old slaves for market by shaving the men’s whiskers off and plucking out their gray hairs, or else blacking them with dye, a process that took ten or fifteen years off the slaves’ apparent age. Before the customers arrived, they were dressed and driven out into the yard, where, often in tears, some were set to dancing, some to jumping, some to singing, and some to playing cards. “This was done to make them appear cheerful and happy,” Brown wrote.