A History of Pan-African Revolt (The Charles H. Kerr Library)

by C. L. R. James

  So far, Turner’s revolt was commonplace. But this revolt had an effect out of all proportion to its size. Though there are reports of slave conspiracies and of plots all over the Southern states for the next thirty years, nothing on a large scale seems to have been attempted. On the other hand at the time of the Turner revolt the Southern slave owners realized that the unrest “was not confined to the slaves.” Henceforward the fear of unity between the blacks and the poor whites drove the South to treat with great severity any opposition to slavery in the South from whatever source it came. A rigid censorship was instituted. In the years before the American Civil War the turmoil among the slaves was widespread all over the South. Their chance came, however, not from the poor whites of the South but from the economic and political necessities of the Northern whites.

  3

  The Civil War

  Before we consider the course of emancipation in America, let us see what the Negroes were to be emancipated from. In 1860, little more than seventy-five years ago, Negro slavery was still widespread in the Southern states of America. We know what slavery was like during the eighteenth century. It had not changed much in the last half of the nineteenth.

  Here is a case that reads as if it came straight from San Domingo, Barbados or British Guiana in 1749.

  The Negro was tied to a tree and whipped with switches. When Souther became fatigued with the labor of whipping, he called upon a Negro man of his and made him “cob” Sam with a single. He also made a Negro woman of his help to ‘cob’ him. And, after “cobbing” and whipping, he applied fire to the body of his slave, about his back, belly and private parts. He then caused him to be washed down with hot water in which pods of red pepper had been steeped. The Negro was also tied to a log, and to the bedpost, with ropes, which choked him, and he was kicked and stamped upon by Souther. This sort of punishment was continued and repeated until the Negro died under its affliction.

  The records of the time tell the same tale of burnings, mutilations, etc., as in the West Indies 150 years before.

  Every slave-owner did not spend every hour of the day beating and torturing his slaves. But few of his neighbors cared if he did, and if he tortured them, it was done so infrequently that it occasioned no surprise in those who saw it. In this respect 1860 was not very different from 1660. Gladstone and The London Times both supported the slave-owners against the North in the American Civil War.

  In this very period, Governor Eyre of Jamaica, without the slightest justification, authorized a murderous persecution of Negroes who had revolted under great provocation and had behaved with great moderation. Maroons were called in, who dashed out the brains of children and ripped open pregnant women; while the more civilized Provost Marshal Ramsay shot victims with his own band and flogged victims until their flesh bespattered the ground. Nearly 500 Negroes were killed and thousands of Negroes were whipped, sometimes with a cat in the strings of which piano-wire was interwoven; as many as two hundred lashes each were administered. Britain was divided, Carlyle leading the defense of Eyre, who was retired on pension. Coming as it did just at the time of the American Civil War, this incident is related here, so that the cruelty of Americans to their slaves might be seen in reasonable perspective.

  Obviously the conscience of mankind or growing enlightenment was not going to abolish Negro slavery in America. These forces in the heart of man had not abolished slavery for 250 years. Why should they suddenly be potent in 1850?

  First of all, as we have seen, the Negro was no docile animal. He revolted continuously. By 1850 he had changed his tactics. For over a generation before the outbreak of the Civil War, the bolder slaves of the South sought freedom by flight to the North, whose economic structure had no need of slavery. In the South, the mountaineers of North Carolina, Kentucky and Tennessee had no need of slaves. They formed anti-slavery societies, and Christian and Liberal revolutionaries assisted fugitive slaves to escape. These and some bold Negroes organized the famous Underground Railway to assist escaping slaves. By various special routes slaves were conducted from the South to the Northern states, where they were free. Thousands of blacks gained their freedom in this way. Bravest and most famous of these underground guides was the Negro, Harriet Tubman. Born a slave, she escaped, but rifle in hand she devoted her life to assisting others to actual freedom by means of the Underground. The Southern owners offered a reward of 40,000 dollars for her capture, but she used to penetrate into the very heart of the South in order to achieve her aims. Not only slaves but free Negroes took part in all this agitation and organization. When John Brown made his famous raid there were Negroes with him, some of whom lost their lives in the fighting, and others at the hands of Southern law. The agitation of the abolitionists, the sensational escapes by the Underground Railway, the ferment among the Negroes, all helped to focus public attention on slavery. But long before the Civil War the great issues at stake were becoming clear.

  The South had dominated the Federal Legislation for more than half a century, but with the increasing industrial expansion of the North, that domination was now in danger. Both North and South were expanding westward. Should the new states be based on slavery as the South wanted or on free capitalism as the North wanted? This was not a moral question. Victory here meant increasing control of the legislature by the victors. The moment the North were strong enough they decreed that there was to be no further extension of slave territory. Nothing else remained for the South but war. Had the Southerners won, their reactionary method of production and the backward civilization based upon it would have dominated the United States. No wonder Karl Marx hailed the Civil War as the greatest event of the age. He was not concerned with the morality or immorality of slavery. What he could see so early was the grandeur of the civilization which lay before the States with the victory of the North. Thus if the Civil War resulted in the abolition of slavery it was not fought for the benefit of the slaves.

  Yet Negro slavery seemed the very basis of American capitalism. Slavery made cotton king; cotton became the very life food of British industries, it built up New England factories. This accounts for not merely the support given to the South by Conservatives but even by certain British Liberals. The protagonists had no illusions. Lincoln once told a Massachusetts audience cheerfully, “I have heard you have abolitionists here. We have a few in Illinois, and we shot one the other day.” Lincoln said openly that to save the Union he would free all the slaves, or free some, or free none.

  What we are really witnessing here is not that sudden change in the conscience of mankind so beloved of romantic and reactionary historians, but the climax of a gradual transformation of world economy. Where formerly landed property had dominated, the French Revolution marks the beginning of the social and political domination of the industrial bourgeoisie. It began in the French Revolution, in Britain its outstanding dates are the Reform Bill of 1832 and the Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, and it reached its culmination with the Civil War in America. The process worked itself out blindly and irrationally. In territories like San Domingo and later Brazil, where new and rich lands cried out for cultivation, the slave remained profitable for years. But we can see today that once capitalism had begun to throw off feudal shackles, slavery was doomed. The millions of slaves were not only ignorant and backward, with a low productivity of labor. Their potential consumption as free men widened the scope of the market. Thus the San Domingo revolution, the abolition of the slave-trade in 1807, the emancipation of the slaves in 1833, and emancipation during the Civil War in America, all these events are but component parts of a single historic process. However confused, dishonest, selfish, idealistic or sincere might be the minds of the abolitionists, they were in the last analysis the agents of the economic necessities of the new age, translated into social and political, sometimes, even, religious terms.

  Lincoln long maintained his attitude. It was the pressure of war which forced him to accept emancipation. The South were using Negroes to build fortifications,
roads, etc., all the important labor of their armies. Where at first be feared a slave revolt which would weaken his political position in the North, he now saw the necessity of at least using slaves for labor purposes. Refugees poured over to the Northern forces and Lincoln tried to get some of them dispatched to Africa, to Haiti and other territories outside America. He was at that time considering a scheme of gradual abolition based upon compensation.

  But the Negro refugees were establishing themselves in the army as capable teamsters, mechanics, and general workers. They were industrious and loyal. The South was proving more difficult to conquer than had at first been thought, and the Negroes would have to be used as soldiers. In 1862 Congress declared that after January 1, 1863, all slaves in rebel territory were free. Northern generals were urging Lincoln to enlist Negroes, and one had already taken the step on his own initiative. The South formed corps of free Negroes who were fighting in its army. Thus Lincoln’s objections were finally overcome by the necessity of events. Before the end of 1865 four Negro regiments were in the field and at the end of the war, three years afterward, 178,875 Negroes had been enrolled in the Northern army. Seventy-five commissions were given, but the Negroes were commanded chiefly by white men. They were discriminated against, being treated as less than the equals of whites. Two regiments refused to accept their pay until it was made equal to that of white men, and one sergeant was court-martialed and shot because he made his company stack arms before the captain’s hut as a protest against discrimination. White troops often used them for fatigue duty. This unfair treatment affected the morale of the blacks, who were often sullen and insubordinate. But of their military quality there was never any question. They defeated some of the crack Southern troops, men who had formerly owned them. Surgeon Seth Rogers said of his soldiers that braver men never lived, and Colonel T.W. Higginson declared that “it would have been madness to attempt with the bravest white troops what he successfully accomplished with the black”: the white troops were not fighting for freedom. Brave as were these blacks, there was nothing naive about them. “They met death coolly, bravely; nor rashly did they expose themselves, but all were steady and obedient to orders.” Lincoln himself admitted that but for the assistance given by the Negroes, the North might have lost. He spoke more wisely than he knew. Negro scholarship in America has conducted investigations, which tend to show that not only the Negro soldiers but the Negroes left behind in the South played a decisive part in the outcome. In the first years of the war the Southern blacks took the side of their masters. They knew them, they did not know the North, and as both were for the maintenance of slavery the difference between them was of no importance. But after the proclamation of emancipation, the news spread and it is claimed that there took place a sort of general strike, an immense sabotage, which helped to bring the South to its knees. Slavery degrades, but under the shock of great events like a revolution, slaves of centuries seem able to conduct themselves with the bravery and discipline of men who have been free a thousand years.

  The American blacks were far more indebted to the political conflicts between North and South America for their freedom than the San Domingo blacks had been to the French Revolution. They were only four million, a minority, even in the South. They were tied indissolubly to America. What was now to become of them?

  The Negroes themselves knew what they wanted—the land— and had they been strong enough to take it, or had the Northern capitalists the wisdom to give it to them, the possibilities opened up both for the Negro and American capitalism would have been immense. The bourgeois revolution against feudalism is only economically complete when the peasants have the land. It was so in France in 1789 and in Russia in 1917. Peasants today are politically alert as never before.

  The Negroes tried to take the land. They had fought with an instinctive confidence that it was going to be theirs, so much so that much of the idleness and discontent in certain areas after the Civil War could be traced to the fact that they had not got what they expected. In certain areas they actually seized the land and refused to return it. The Negro soldiers and the militia were trained to arms, they and their allies secured large quantities of ammunition, and in the latter part of 1865 the South lived in fear of a slave insurrection. The proposal was actually made to oppose the return of confiscated property and substitute instead a scheme for dividing the estates of the leading rebels into forty-acre plots for each freed man. The rest would be sold to pay off the national debt and fifty dollars would be given to each homestead as a start.

  Revolutionary as these proposals were, yet nine-tenths of the population of the South would have been untouched. But Congress, though busy expropriating the farmers of the West and even the South for the benefit of the railroad and mining companies, would not touch Southern property for the benefit of the Negroes. It would have meant the creation of a body of peasant proprietors for whom co-operative and similar schemes would have been comparatively easy, it would have resulted in a great extension, of the internal “market,” and the Negro question would never have been the problem that it is today in America. This revolution could easily have been accomplished in the early days after the Civil War. The Southerners were too cowed to resist, the sporadic efforts of the Negroes only needed coordination. Why was the opportunity missed? First, because the peasants in a revolution have to seize the land. Only the Jacobins, as late as 1793, ratified the seizure in France. The Kerensky government in Russia could go no further than an elaborate land law, and the peasants had to wait for the Bolsheviks to encourage and legalize the seizure. Only a revolution in which the poor were the driving force would have held out its hand to the blacks and made common cause of its own objectives and land for the blacks. There was no such revolution in America. What the dominant American bourgeoisie did, however, is as revealing of the true nature of American race prejudice as the behavior of the San Domingo whites during the black revolution. The war had divided the Northern bourgeoisie into the small men on the one hand and on the other, the bankers, the magnates of iron and steel and the railways, linking themselves into great corporations. Monopoly capitalism was on its way. But it was as yet small. In a new country its control of propaganda, organs of publicity, etc., was not sufficient to ensure its control of elections. The small capitalists would outnumber the big capitalists and gain control of the government. Writing in the American Mercury of April 1938, a Southerner has shown that the huge patriarchal estates of the South are a tenacious legend with no foundation in fact. Most of the Southern slave-owners were farmers on a not very large scale. There was also a small capitalist class growing in the South. A combination between these and their brethren in the North would be fatal to the monopolists. By illegally excluding representatives of the Southern States from the legislature, the big bourgeoisie passed legislation to ensure their predominance and enfranchised the Negroes in order to use these votes against their white rivals in the South. They then dispatched special agents, the carpet-baggers, to pose as the friends of the Negro and to manipulate the Negro vote in their favor.

  Thus the North did not allow race prejudice against the Negro to impede its wishes, accepted the fact that he was needed to help hold the South in control, and cooperated politically with him. The Southern states were offered the choice of military government or universal manhood suffrage “without regard to color, race or previous condition of servitude.” They were thus trapped either way. Some of the states accepted the Negro voter, others refused, among them Virginia, Georgia and Texas. Between 1868 and 1872 certain states were governed by whites and blacks, many of the blacks being newly-emancipated slaves.

  The idea that the Negroes dominated is wholly false. Only twenty-three Negroes served in Congress from 1868 to 1895. Many Negro state officials were illiterate; in certain state legislatures more than half the Negro members could scarcely read or write. Yet there were among them many capable men. There is no evidence to prove that they were more than usually corrupt or rapacious. The Norther
ners who entered these Southern governments and plundered them were potent sources of corruption. The black officials naturally sided with Northerners against the old slave-owners. When in a few years the Southern states were restored to Southern control, in nearly every state the white officers in control of the funds defaulted. But no exposure was made of this. In another generation, Northern monopoly capitalism had America in its grasp. It left the Negro to his fate, and the South turned on him. Landless, his Northern collaborators gone, he was whipped back to an existence bordering on servitude.

  Yet despite the inevitable ignorance and backwardness, the few years during which the Negroes were associated with the government of certain Southern states marked the high watermark of progressive legislation in the South. Little publicity is given to the things they helped to do. “They obeyed the Constitution and annulled the bonds of states, counties and cities which were issued to carry on the War of Rebellion and maintain armies in the field against the Union. They instituted a public school system in the realm where public schools had been unknown. They opened the ballot-box and jury-box to thousands of white men who had been debarred from them by lack of earthly possessions. They introduced Home Rule in the South. They abolished the whipping post, the branding-iron, the stocks, and other barbarous forms of punishment which, up to that time, prevailed. They reduced capital felonies from about twenty to two or three. In an age of extravagance, they were extravagant in the sums appropriated for public works. In all that time no man’s right of person was invaded under the forms of law. Every Democrat’s life, home, fireside and business were safe. No man obstructed any white man’s way to the ballot-box, interfered with his freedom or boycotted him on account of his political faith.” It was the policy of a people poor and backward seeking to establish a community where all, black and white, could live in amity and freedom. It deserves to be remembered.