American Dreams Trilogy

by Michael Phillips

  “In the peak years of the 1700s, slave traffic flourished along the coast of West Africa. European traders paid African kings goods and guns in exchange for human cargo to fill their ships. The largest numbers of slaves were by far sent to Portuguese Brazil and the British and French Caribbean. Between 1700 and 1808 only 6 percent were sent to the American Colonies, and, later, the United States.” [Historical Atlas of the United States, Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 1993, p. 40.]

  “The importation of blacks into the colonies was slow. After the initial twenty arrived in Virginia, several years elapsed before any more were imported. In 1625, there were only twenty-three Negroes in Virginia, and by the middle of the century the black population was only three hundred. Major importations of Negroes did not begin until the last quarter of the century. Just how major the importations were is shown by the fact that Virginia’s population in 1708 was listed as twelve thousand Negroes and eighteen thousand whites. By 1756, there were 120, 156 blacks and 173, 316 whites.

  “…as the black population of the colony grew, Virginians became deeply concerned about the social problem, as it would be called today. When there were two blacks for every three white men in the colony, the enforcement problem became immense, particularly since Negroes in the colony showed a strong tendency toward insurrection. As early as 1663 there was evidence of a conspiracy to rebel. In 1687, a plot was uncovered in which Negroes planned to kill all the whites in the area in a bid for freedom. The colony was rife with rumors of still other plots.

  “The Virginia legislature tried to combat the threat of insurrection by stringent laws that severely restricted the rights of slaves, their ability to congregate and travel from place to place, and imposed barbaric penalties for breaking the slave law or the white man’s law. Even in Colonial America, slaves and free whites were covered by different laws with radically different punishments. The slave regulations, known as the ‘Black Codes,’ were adopted by all the colonies and went through many refinements through the years. The early code of Virginia called for some notable punishments. A slave found guilty of murder or rape was hanged. If he robbed a house or store, a slave was given sixty lashes by the sheriff, then placed in the pillory with his ears nailed to the posts for half an hour. After that, his ears were severed from his head. If the slave’s offense was less serious than burglary, he was merely whipped, maimed, or branded.” [Robert Liston, Slavery in America. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970, pp. 42-44.]

  A note on what “freedom” meant to blacks in the 18th century South:

  “…free people of color ought never to insult or strike white people, nor presume to conceive themselves equal to the whites; but, on the contrary, they ought to yield to them on every occasion, and never speak or answer them but with respect, but, under penalty of imprisonment, according to the nature of the offense.”—a Louisiana law. [William Goodell, The American Slave Code. New York: American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 1853, reprinted by Arno Press, New York, 1969, p. 357.]

  Freedom Stirs

  “At the end of the Revolution, the new American government warned the British government against exporting slaves into the United States. Many states also took legal action to limit or abolish slavery. Virginia in 1778 and Maryland in 1783 enacted laws against bringing slaves into their states to sell. Pennsylvania passed a law for the gradual abolition of slavery in 1780. By 1783, slavery had been abolished in Massachusetts by judicial decision; the Massachusetts courts decreed that the institution was obviously illegal since the state constitution had declared that ‘all men are born free and equal.’ In 1786, New Jersey passed a manumission act [the right to grant freedom to slaves] and North Carolina imposed a heavy duty on slave imports. In 1787, South Carolina banned the importation of slaves for five years. During this same year, the Continental Congress, acting under the Articles of Confederation, forbade the existence of slavery in the territory northwest of the Ohio River.” [L.H. Ofosu-Appiah, People in Bondage. Minneapolis: Lerner Publications, 1971, p. 76.]

  “The first census, in 1790, reported the slave population at nearly 700,000, with 75 percent in the southern Atlantic states.

  “Though all the northern states had abolished slavery or provided for its gradual end [by 1810], 30,000 slaves still worked in fields, homes, and factories. The largest number, 15,017, labored in New York State under the harshest codes in the North.

  “Although Virginia still had the most slaves [by 1830], the spread of cotton into Alabama and Mississippi required massive increases of slaves there. The nation’s slave population had grown to two million, and in the South more stringent codes were introduced to control and confine them.

  “By 1860 nearly four million Afro-Americans remained in bondage, while some 500,000 were free—half of them living in slave states. Most were descendents of manumitted slaves who had been released after the Revolution for meritorious service or because sympathetic masters had felt a moral imperative.”

  “When the legal U.S. slave trade with Africa ended in 1808, domestic trading became big business in the South, where demand was growing as fast as cotton. Finding less profit in owning slaves than in selling them, eastern farmers shipped slaves to the Gulf states. Some walked west with migrating masters, but most were auctioned at centers such as New Orleans, where a slave sold for a third more than in Virginia.” [Historical Atlas of the United States, Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 1993, pp. 40-41.]

  “The roots of the abolitionist movement lay in the growing power of evangelical Christianity, which was appalled at the wickedness and injustice evident in so many areas of American life. Businesses were rapacious and dishonest, banks misused their customers’ money, cities were sinks of iniquity and licentiousness; many Americans drank to excess, denied the rights of women and free blacks, abused the Indians, threatened the Mexicans, talked recklessly of war with Great Britain for a remote portion of territory in the Pacific Northwest. Above all, above everything else, ‘the land of the free’ denied freedom to millions of human beings whose only crime was the color of their skin. Evangelical Christianity had about it, certainly, a touch of hysteria, and a degree of fanaticism, the hysteria that was so evident in camp meetings and revivals, the fanaticism that refused to be quiet about the terrible sin of slavery… Blacks were the modern prototypes of the ‘suffering servant.’ Their suffering and servitude brought to the orthodox Christian mind the servitude of the Jews in Egypt, the suffering of Christ on the cross. By sharing, through physical and material sacrifice, the sufferings of the black man and woman, the white Christian might identify himself or herself with the Savior. One thing was clear enough: America stood in desperate need of redemption.

  “American reformers worked in virtually every area, but it was as abolitionists that the champions of Christian redemption made their greatest impact. William Jay, the son of John J’ay, wrote, ‘I do not depend on anyone as an abolitionist who does not act from a sense of religious obligation.’

  “Abolitionism was, to be sure, merely a branch of a larger antislavery movement. Anyone who disliked slavery and was willing to say so was eligible to join one of the numerous antislavery societies that sprang up in such profusion during the late 1820s and the 1830s. The antislavery movement was, moreover, international, or at least Anglo-American. British middle-class Protestant reformers had been tireless in their efforts to have slavery abolished from the British West Indies, and they made common cause with their American cousins. What became, increasingly, the dividing line in the antislavery movement was ‘immediatism’ versus ‘gradualism.’ The immediatists declared that no compromise could be made with the institution of slavery. Slavery must be abolished ‘immediately,’ or, at the very least, its abolition should begin immediately. It was not enough to declare that slavery must be eventually abolished; ‘eventually’ sounded more and more like ‘never.’” [Page Smith, The Nation Comes of Age. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981, pp. 597-98.]

  “…in 1829 [David Walker] published hi
s pamphlet, Walker’s Appeal. It was a harsh outcry against the injustices done the Black, and an open call to rise up in arms and overthrow slavery. In a year it ran through three editions, terrifying the slaveholders. Georgia offered $10,000 for Walker taken alive and $1,000 for him dead. State after state in the South made it a crime to circulate his Appeal, and a crime to teach Blacks to read.

  Suddenly, Walker disappeared; some said murdered…. [Milton Meltzer, The Black Americans. New York: Thomas Crowell, 1964, pp. 14-16.]

  “My Beloved Brethren: The Indians of North and of South America—the Greeks—the Irish, subjected under the king of Great Britain—the Jews, that ancient people of the Lord—the inhabitants of the islands of the sea—in the fine, all the inhabitants of the earth (except however, the sons of Africa), are called men, and of course are, and ought to be free. But we (coloured people), and our children are brutes!! And of course, and ought to be SLAVES to the American people and their children forever!! To dig their mines and work their farms; and thus go on enriching them, from one generation to another with our blood and our tears!!!!…

  “Remember Americans, that we must and shall be free and enlightened as you are, will you wait until we shall, under God, obtain our liberty by the crushing arm of power? Will it not be dreadful for you? I speak Americans for your good. We must and shall be free I say, in spite of you. You may do your best to keep us in wretchedness and misery, to enrich you and your children, but God will deliver us from under you. And wo, wo, will be to you if we have to obtain our freedom by fighting. Throw away your fears and prejudices then, and enlighten us and treat us like men, and we will like you more that we do not hate you, and tell us no more about colonization, for America is as much our country, as it is yours.

  “Treat us like men, and there is no danger but we will all live in peace and happiness together. For we are not like you, hard hearted, unmerciful, and unforgiving. What a happy country this will be, if the whites will listen. What nation under heaven will be able to do any thing with us, unless God gives us up into its hand.

  “But Americans, I declare to you, while you keep us and our children in bondage, and treat us like brutes… we cannot be your friends.” [An excerpt from David Walker’s Appeal to the Slaves of the United States. Milton Meltzer, The Black Americans. New York: Thomas Crowell, 1964, pp. 14-16.]

  The Deliverer

  “Nat Turner died on the gallows, but his ghostly spirit hovered above every southerner. Slaveholder James McDowell told the Virginia legislature the uprising raised the ‘suspicion that a Nat Turner might be in every family….’”

  “Mrs. Lawrence Lewis, niece of George Washington, wrote about ‘a smothered volcano—we know not when or where the flame will burst forth, but we know that death in the most horrid forms threatens us….’

  “Southern legislatures voted their fears. Since Turner read and preached, laws were passed against black preachers and banning the teaching of slaves. ‘To see you with a book in your hand, they would almost cut your throat,’ recalled one slave. Laws were passed in many southern states that made manumission [freeing] of slaves almost impossible.

  “One Virginia legislator spoke of his goal for slaves: ‘We have, as far as possible, closed every avenue by which light might enter their minds. If you could extinguish the capacity to see the light, our work would be completed; they would then be on a level with the beasts of the field, and we should be safe.’” [William Katz, Breaking the Chains. New York: Atheneum, 1990, pp. 119-121.]

  “After 1831 the abolitionists began to use railroad terms when talking about runaways. Abolitionists were ‘agents’ on the Underground Railroad. A runaway slave was called a ‘package.’ When a slave ran away he was ‘taking a ticket on the Underground Railroad.’ A man or woman who led a runaway slave to the North was called a ‘conductor.’ A conductor went into the South to lead slaves north to freedom.” [Angela Medearis, Come This Far To Freedom. New York: Atheneum, 1993, pp. 28-31.]

  “The Underground Railroad was the practical arm of the abolitionist movement. It was a daily, dramatic manifestation of the determination of slaves to be free, free in the face of every hazard, and of the determination of thousands of whites to aid and abet them. The Underground Railroad was the more remarkable in that it ran directly in the face of the American respect for property. Every slave helped to escape by a white man or woman appeared to Southerners, and to many Northerners as well, to be stolen property, and those who aided them no better than bank robbers or burglars. Each theft encouraged among other slaves the hope of being ‘stolen,’ so that the analogy must encompass the notion of an epidemic as well as a theft, a cancerous disease as well as an assault on property. Every single escaped slave made the system tremble.” [Page Smith, The Nation Comes of Age. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981, p. 599.]

  “From the New England Articles of Confederation in 1643 forward, European masters legally bound themselves to assist in the return of escaped slaves. Slaveholders had this pledge written into the U.S. Constitution and two federal Fugitive Slave acts. Slave-hunting was to be carried out by federal marshals and the U.S. Army if necessary.

  “Slaveholders would not tolerate any gap in their defense system. They bitterly resented Native American nations for accepting African Americans into their villages and were furious about an Indian adoption system that drew no color line…. the governor of Virginia had the Five Civilized Nations promise to surrender escapees, and in 1726, the governor of New York made the Iroquois Confederacy take the same pledge….

  “Along the Atlantic coast and spreading westward through woods and over mountains to the Mississippi, two dark races began to blend and marry. Artist George Catlin, writing in the 1830s, called the children of this mixture [of Negroes and Indians] ‘the finest and most powerful men I have ever yet seen.’…

  “The strongest U.S. coalition of red and black people flowered in Florida around 1776. African runaways from plantations in Georgia became the peninsula’s first settlers and were soon joined by Seminoles fleeing oppression…. The two dark peoples developed a prosperous and peaceful farming and grazing economy….

  “Runaways who reached the North were often pursued by possies who seized and returned them. The 1793 Fugitive Slave Act imposed a $500 fine on any person who harbored or aided an escapee….

  “African-American communities in the North and their white friends increasingly defied the law to provide armed assistance to fugitives.” [William Katz, Breaking the Chains. New York: Atheneum, 1990, pp. 84-85, 97.]

  Three Lives… Three Fates… Three Futures

  In 1836, missionary Marcus Whitman and his wife Narcissa Prentiss Whitman traveled west with three others. The two women of the group were the first white women to reach Oregon by an overland route. The five established a mission at Waiilatpu near Fort Walla Walla and went on to establish several other missions in present eastern Washington and Idaho. The Whitmans and eleven of their co-workers were murdered by the Cayuse Indians in 1847, resulting in the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions abandoning its work in the Oregon Territory.

  Part I: Seeds of Freedom

  Seven

  *“It was legal in Virginia to emancipate one’s slaves, though if the freed slave was over twenty-one years of age, he or she had to leave the state within one year, or risk being re-enslaved. And the widow of a deceased slaveholder who had freed a slave, could claim a ‘third’ ownership of that slave to which a widow is entitled….

  “…slaveholding Quakers in North Carolina… empancipated 134 slaves in 1776, only to see them re-enslaved.”—William Goodell, The American Slave Code. New York: The American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 1853, reprinted by Arno Press, New York, 1969, pp. 342-43, 375.

  Part II: Roots of Strife

  Fifteen

  *“The South never got over Nat Turner. He made very clear what the form of slave revolt would be—wholesale murder of white people…. Slave owners and the legislatures of slave states took elaborate p
recautions to avoid another Nat Turner. The whole system making the Negroes inferior… while rooted in racism, also served to forestall a revolt by diminshing the slave’s will to resist. The law forbidding the teaching and reading and writing of slaves was intended both to prevent slaves from reading abolitionist literature or the Bible, which might inflame a desire for liberty, and to make communication between slaves difficult. The restrictions on slave assemblies and travel were intended to make a large-scale conspiracy impossible. The harshness and injustice of punishment inflicted on slave wrongdoing was calculated to break the spirit of any would-be leader and provide an example to possible followers. Planters made an effort to spot potential leaders and either watch them carefully or sell them into hard labor. An informal system was organized. Owners courted pet or privileged salves who would inform on activites in the slave quarters.

  “The South sought to discourage insurrection by making freedom as undesirable as possible. There were 250,000 free Negroes in the South in 1860, but…‘the distinction between slaves and free Negroes had diminished to a point that in some instances it was hardly discernible….’

  “Every effort was made to keep the slave from being freed or from keeping freedom after winning it. The free Negro lived in constant fear of being kidnapped back into slavery…. The free Negro was restricted at every turn.”—Robert Liston, Slavery in America. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970, pp. 108-09.

  †An 1848 Virginia statute made teaching slaves to read or write illegal. In 1853, Mrs. Douglass of Norfolk began teaching black children to read and write. She was arrested and sentenced to a month in jail.

  Twenty-Two

  *A Virginia law of 1832 provided that “no slave, free Negro, or mulatto, whether he shall have been ordained or licensed, or otherwise, shall heareafter undertake to preach, exhort or conduct, or hold any assembly or meeting for religious or other purposes, either in day time, or at night.” The minimum penalty was 39 lashes. Whites could take Negroes to their churches, and white preachers could preach to Negroes, but they were forbidden to teach blacks anything that might be construed as seditious.