Bound for Canaan

by Fergus Bordewich

  When demand was high, buyers were sometimes swept with what planters called “Negro fever.” Mobs descended on newly arrived ships, snatching at the ravaged and bewildered Africans, peering into mouths and grabbing at limbs, and buying what they wanted on the spot. In small communities, slave sales often took on an atmosphere resembling a country fair. One auction in rural North Carolina was described by a visiting Yankee ship’s captain who attended it to entertain himself while his ship was being unloaded. The auction, the anonymous seaman wrote in his journal, brought crowds of the country people to town “and by the middle of the afternoon the streets and stores are pretty well speckled with drunkards.”

  3

  For most people, as for the Yankee skipper, slavery was simply part of the American landscape, sometimes a pleasantly picturesque one. George Whitfield, an early Georgia religious leader, asserted in 1737 that to invite white settlers to the colony without making it possible for them to own slaves was “little better than tying their legs and bidding them to walk.” One planter wrote, a few years later, “It is as clear as light itself, that negroes are as essentially necessary to the cultivation of Georgia as axes, hoes, or any other utensil of agriculture.” The noted Philadelphia botanist William Bartram, who traveled through the Southern states in the 1770s, took what he saw of slavery at bemused face value. An unusually acute observer when it came to plants, he was charmed by the picturesque sight of a South Carolina timber crew “of a gigantic stature, fat and muscular,” hewing great pine and cypress trees: “Contented and joyful, the sooty sons of Afric forgetting their bondage, in chorus sung the virtues and beneficence of their master in songs of their own composition.” The sanitized image of simple, happy slaves would become a classic one in an ever-growing body of pro-slavery literature that would continue to flourish without interruption through the romantic twentieth-century hokum of Gone With the Wind.

  The truth, of course, is that slavery never had any innocence to lose, and it was never simple except in the eye of the white beholder. In 1790, a year after Josiah Henson’s birth, there were 697,647 slaves in the United States, about 17 percent of the total population of 3,929,827. Within the common denominator of lifetime bondage, their lives varied considerably. The vast majority, perhaps 90 percent, worked at some form of agricultural labor. Women as well as men were often assigned to the heaviest work, such as plowing. Many others were trained to specialized trades, as carpenters, coopers, blacksmiths, teamsters, grooms, and not infrequently as overseers. Slaves also worked as valets and maidservants, nurses, cooks, and laundresses, and as servants in hotels and taverns. They crewed trading vessels that ranged along the inland rivers and the Atlantic coast. In the estuaries of Chesapeake Bay and coastal North Carolina, slave watermen harvested shad, oysters, and crabs, and piloted oceangoing vessels around hidden shoals. In every major port, slave artisans worked at caulking and refitting, and slave draymen and stevedores moved cargoes of cotton and rice, molasses, rum, and Yankee textiles. Hired-out slaves worked in coal mines, foundries, textile mills, brickyards, and cigar factories. As far north as New England, slaves tilled fields and tended herds; in some rural areas of New York state, they reached 20 percent of the local population. While most slaves worked directly for their masters, many others were leased out like modern-day rental equipment. In the personal papers of slave owners, there are relatively few references to “negroes” or “slaves,” apart from an occasional runaway, or the death of an especially trusted retainer. But then why should there be? Slaves were a form of real estate, or human furniture, so to speak, whose personal life had no more intimate meaning than that of a cow, or a settee. Where they were considered human, the law allowed them no claim on their own families. It has been estimated that in the Upper South forcible separations probably destroyed one out of every three first marriages by slaves, and that a similar proportion of enslaved children were taken away from one or both parents to be sold.

  Slaves might be property, but they were costly property, especially at the dawn of the nineteenth century, when the burgeoning cotton industry dramatically increased the demand for labor just as public opinion was pressing for an end to the transatlantic slave trade. “The time has been,” complained one planter, “that the farmer could kill up and wear out one Negro to buy another; but it is not so now. Negroes are too high in proportion to the price of cotton, and it behooves those who own them to make them last as long as possible.” To return maximum value to their owners, slaves, like any expensive tools, had to be properly maintained. They had to be fed, clothed, housed, and kept in work.

  When they failed to perform, they had to be punished. Disciplining slaves posed certain problems. In contrast to free laborers, slaves could not be fired, and they could not be jailed without losing the value of their work. Nor could they be fined, since they had no money. What remained was physical punishment, which at least in theory was carefully calibrated so that it wouldn’t permanently damage the “property.” In 1710 the Virginia planter William Byrd noted in his diary that “my wife against my will caused little Jenny to be burned with a hot iron, for which I quarreled with her.” Boston King, a slave apprenticed to a Charleston carpenter in the 1770s, was beaten severely on the head when any of the men in the workshop misplaced one of the master’s tools. Olaudah Equiano was terrified by the sight of a female slave, a cook, who, for unexplained reasons, “was cruelly loaded with various kinds of iron machines; she had one particularly on her head [an “iron muzzle”], which locked her mouth so fast that she could scarcely speak, and could not eat or drink.” On a Georgia plantation, floggings were regulated so that field drivers could administer only twelve lashes, the head driver thirty-six, and the overseer no more than fifty, a number that would leave the victim’s flesh in ribbons. In the late 1770s William Dunbar, a sophisticated Mississippi settler who corresponded with Thomas Jefferson, condemned two runaways to five hundred lashes each, spaced out over time, and to “carry a chain & log fixt to the ancle.” Flogging, it should be said, was also widely practiced in white American families upon their own members. As a small boy in the first decade of the nineteenth century, John Brown, who would end his life as the most famous of abolitionist martyrs, was savagely thrashed by his father for stealing three pins, and as a father himself, he applied the rod to his own children in accordance with a strictly enforced regime: eight lashes for disobedience to their mother, eight for telling a lie, three for “unfaithfulness at work,” and so on.

  The punishment of slaves for serious infractions was at times obscene by modern standards, but less so in an age that believed in natural inequality, and utterly lacked contemporary ideas of human rights. As Josiah Henson cruelly learned, the amputation of ears, as well as toes and fingers, was standard, and castration and burning at the stake were not unknown. In 1736 a Methodist minister heard a South Carolina slave owner recommend that one “first nail up a Negro by the ears, then order him to be whipped in the severest manner, and then to have scalding water thrown over him.” Moses Roper’s owner punished him for attempting to escape by pouring tar on his head, rubbing it over his face, and setting it on fire, although he put the fire out, Roper noted, “before it did me very great injury.” After another escape attempt, Roper’s left hand was placed in a vise and squeezed until all his fingernails peeled off. In the 1830s William Wells Brown, another chronic runaway, was first whipped and then tied up in the smokehouse and subjected to a fire of tobacco stems, a technique referred to as a “decent smoking,” by his innkeeper master. The harshest punishments of all were reserved for those who physically attacked whites. When a slave girl belonging to the comparatively enlightened William Dunbar was convicted of killing a white, her hand was first cut off, and she was then hanged.

  A blow struck against one white man was considered a blow against all, an act of rebellion that was not to be tolerated in areas where slaves sometimes far outnumbered whites. The French-American farmer and author Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur learned this o
ne evening in 1783, while walking to dinner in the suburbs of Charleston, when he came upon a scene that shocked his philosophical sensibility. “I perceived a negro, suspended in the cage, left there to expire!” he wrote. The cage hung from a tree alongside the path. Around it, birds of prey fluttered looking for a perch. “I shudder when I recollect that the birds had already picked out his eyes: his cheek bones were bare; his arms had been attacked in several places, and his body seemed covered with a multitude of wounds. From the edges of the hollow sockets, and from the lacerations with which he was disfigured, the blood slowly dropped, and tinged the ground beneath. No sooner were the birds flown, than swarms of insects covered the whole body of this unfortunate wretch eager to feed on his mangled flesh and to drink his blood.” Crèvecoeur managed to give a little water to the man, who told him that he had been hanging in the cage for two days as punishment for killing the overseer of the plantation on which he had worked. Later, over dinner, Crèvecoeur’s hosts explained that such executions were rendered necessary by the “laws of self-preservation.”

  4

  At the end of the eighteenth century, slaves thus lived under a regime in which fear was woven into the fabric of life, the threat of savage punishment was horrifyingly explicit, and the obstacles to a general revolution were insurmountable. Slaves could run away, and often did. But the great majority didn’t run far. Late eighteenth-century advertisements for runaways in the Virginia Gazette offer some idea of where they went. Peter, a slave “who speaks very broken” and “has a down look,” was supposed to be lurking around his wife’s dwelling “in the lower part of the county.” Stepney Blue had acquired a forged pass as a free man and was supposed to be “hiring himself out somewhere in the region.” Caesar, who escaped near Prince Edward Courthouse, may have gone to Cumberland County where he was raised, “and must have formed some connections.” Gabriel, a weaver, had forged a pass and may be seeking to board a vessel to get out of the colony. An older couple, Toby and Betty, may have made off by water to North Carolina, where they originally came from. Of these fugitives, only Gabriel the weaver was striking out for complete freedom in some distant place. The rest, like the vast majority of runaways, had chosen to take their chances close to where they had been enslaved, apparently counting on poor communications to save them from recapture. But none of them could count on permanent safety.

  From the earliest days of colonization, the law recognized runaway slaves as a problem. The United States Constitution explicitly required that fugitives from “service or labour” in any state be delivered up to their owner. To this was added, in 1793, the nation’s first Fugitive Slave Act, which empowered a fugitive’s master or a hired slave catcher to seize him and return him to the state from which he had fled, with the usually pro forma approval of a local magistrate. Both the law and public opinion so favored slave owners that as the new century approached, for fugitive slaves, there was no safe haven anywhere. Although there were growing numbers of men and women who opposed slavery for religious reasons, few believed that they had a moral right to break the law to help runaways. Slavery in some form was still legal in every Northern state except Vermont. In 1776 there were six and a half thousand black slaves in Connecticut, and fifteen thousand in New York state, only one thousand fewer than in Georgia as late as 1790. Fugitives managed to escape into wilderness regions, but by the late eighteenth century these were shrinking east of the Alleghenies. Moreover, most slaves were no better fitted to survive on their own than white men stripped of the accoutrements of civilization. Some slaves also escaped into Indian country, but they were as likely to be enslaved there or sold back to their masters, as they were to be welcomed as free men. Canada was still little known to slaves even in the Northeast, and in any case slavery was still legal there too, though no longer common.

  The story of James Mars and his family suggests the prospects that fugitives faced, even where slavery was rare and whites sympathetic. Mars, who was born in 1790, his parents, a brother, and a sister belonged to a minister named Thompson, who lived in Canaan, Connecticut, in the rugged, thinly populated northwest corner of the state. Thompson, who was married to a Southern woman, had strong proslavery sentiments, and at a time when antislavery sentiment was spreading in New England, preached from the pulpit that God himself had sanctioned the institution. Thompson had acquired property in Virginia, and in 1798 decided to move there permanently, taking along his slaves. Mars’s father, however, was determined not to let his family be carried south, and carefully planned their escape on the eve of Thompson’s departure. The elder Mars had learned that the inhabitants of the neighboring town of Norfolk were feuding with those in Canaan, for reasons unknown to him, and now lost to history. It is likely that he had already received encouragement from antislavery families in Canaan. In any event, as James Mars put it in a brief memoir later in life, the family threw itself on the mercy of people there. Initially, all went according to plan. As hoped, the Mars family was welcomed in Norfolk, eight miles to the east along the valley of the Blackberry River. There they were sheltered, fed, and protected for the next several weeks by an impressive number of townspeople, who included a number of Norfolk’s most respected families. Their first host was none other than Giles Pettibone, the town’s representative in the state assembly, as well as its treasurer and justice of the peace. For a time, the Marses were lent an empty house, and then, when Thompson was reported to be on their trail, they were led to a remote home occupied by “a very pleasant family.” A visiting law student took Mars’s older brother to his own home across the state line in Massachusetts. Meanwhile, Thompson somehow managed to make contact with the elder Marses and convinced them to return with him to Canaan to help him pack his belongings for the journey to Virginia. After a day or two, the Marses panicked and fled a second time to Norfolk, where they stayed at a popular tavern owned by Luther Lawrence, a Revolutionary War veteran. A human shell game now ensued. Whenever Lawrence heard that Thompson was in the area, he would send the Marses to hide in the surrounding woods. Sometimes the members of the family were separated. Eight-year-old James was sent to stay with Nathaniel Pease, a prosperous shoemaker, almost all the way back to Canaan, then with a man named Camp, then with someone named Akins, then a Foot family, then another Akins. This went on for weeks. The entire time, Thompson continued to propose deals: he would take the boys and give the parents their freedom; he would keep the parents and free the boys. Eventually the Marses became convinced that there was no safe place for them to live. Through intermediaries, a deal was made. Thompson proposed to sell the boys until they were twenty-five years of age (as permitted by Connecticut law) to somebody whom the elder Marses would select. He would give the other members of the family their freedom. Buyers acceptable to the Mars parents were found in towns about fifteen miles apart, and the boys were sold to them for one hundred pounds each, in September 1798.

  In this story, several important truths emerge. A surprising number of ordinary citizens were willing to ignore the law temporarily, and able to mobilize networks of family and friends—precisely what would later knit together the Underground Railroad—in an effort to keep the Mars family out of their master’s hands. It is also clear that, especially in the person of Giles Pettibone, the local authorities were willing to turn a blind eye to activities that must have been obvious in a town as small as Norfolk. Indeed, several of the families who sheltered the Marses lived in homes only a few hundred feet apart, on or near the village green, the center of town. Mars never clarifies the motivation of the people who helped him and his family. The unspecified animosity between the inhabitants of the two towns may have played a part in the story, but it can hardly explain all the effort that the people of Norfolk undertook in the fugitives’ behalf. Many of them must have helped the Marses because they believed it was the right thing to do. But it is also clear that there was no larger organization in place, no system for moving the fugitives far beyond the reach of the persistent parson. At no
point during their odyssey were the Marses ever more than ten or fifteen miles from Thompson’s home. In the end, there was no alternative to at least some of the family’s reenslavement. In 1798, for the Mars family, despite a good plan, knowledge of the region and its people, great personal determination, and white friends, slavery was a fact from which there was still no escape.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE FATE OF MILLIONS UNBORN

  I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever.

  —THOMAS JEFFERSON

  1

  It is possible that the eleven-year-old Josiah Henson—now settled with his mother on Isaac Riley’s farm, in Maryland—knew at least something about what was happening on March 4, 1801. Since he was illiterate, he could not read the National Intelligencer, the local newspaper, which in recent days had been carrying reports on the new president-elect Thomas Jefferson and his vice president Aaron Burr, the appointment of John Marshall as Chief Justice of the United States, and the gala inaugural gathering just a few miles away in Washington. But he surely heard whites talking about such things, along with news of the recent sale of public lots at Tunnicliff’s Hotel, and the arrival of a shipment of wines for local sale. Even if news of the inauguration penetrated the slave quarters on the George Town Road, it would have had little immediate significance to a boy who knew the young nation’s ringing declarations of liberty and equality were intended to apply exclusively to white men.