Freedom

by Freedom- The Overthrow of the Slave Empires (retail) (epub)

  The immensity of Brazil offered great opportunities for runaway slaves to find freedom and possibly safety in numbers. Fugitive communities emerged in forested, swampy and mountainous regions, and even close to cities. Some even managed to trade independently in neighbouring cities, protected by local slaves and sustained by simple economic necessity: people wanted the goods they offered, brought from the distant interior. Communities of escaped slaves – quilombos – thrived on Brazil’s political and military instability in the nineteenth century, and on slave owners’ inability to maintain a firm grip over their slaves in times of confusion and disorder. Fugitives were also joined by criminals, by military deserters and by men keen to avoid being recruited for the wars. Sometimes quilombos themselves became aggressive and rebellious in light of specific injustices and outrages. Their intent was not the destruction of slavery, but making it more tolerable for its victims.[4]

  Most slaves, however, did not run away (though in some places, considerable numbers did). Most of them simply remained where they were, coping, as best they could, with whatever difficulties and dangers life threw at them. Though this might suggest a bland passivity, the reality was quite different. Slaves everywhere learned how to cope with life’s daily torments via routines of veiled and even open defiance. At times, even their passivity had more to it than meets the eye. They were, after all, unwilling and stubborn recruits to the tasks they were given. Some, notably domestic slaves and others working close to their owners, chose to please them by a faux good nature and an apparent willingness to obey promptly. Such endeavours often flattered to deceive. Slaves knew that they might be rewarded, might win a master’s approval and obtain benefits for themselves and loved ones. There was method and self-interest in their application and courtesy Extra food, better clothing, the occasional treat, free time – preferential treatment for children and relatives – all and more might be secured from a master or mistress in return for good work and service. (It was no accident that, for all its particular risks, domestic work was a prized position among the slaves; better to work in the kitchen than in the fields.)

  Slaves also took revenge for their various grievances. If a driver or master struck a slave, or assaulted him or her excessively, they ran the risk of physical retaliation: an angry blow or attack, even an assault with a weapon. Slaves, however, were all too conscious of where that might lead. Slave owners, and the legal apparatus that supported them, fell back on vicious reprisals and execution, often with body parts left rotting in the open where other slaves could see them. All this was a reprise of what had happened on the slave ships. We also know of slaves who retreated from life’s miseries into a dark personal place. Africans fresh from the slave ships often seemed apathetic and even viewed their own mortality with indifference.[5] Some killed themselves. More common though was shuffling into some form of accommodation. Doing just enough to gain the boss’s approval, while rarely taxing themselves to the limit. In any case, revenge beckoned in other directions. Damaging property and the owner’s possessions (animals were a favourite target) or going through the motions of routine work without achieving very much. In the fields, however, this too was risky. Slave cultivation was a highly regulated and scrutinised business, and slave owners and their managers knew how much yield to expect from a gang; how much area of a field should be cleared in a given time, how much produce to be cut and bundled, plucked or picked. Back-sliding that threatened to fall below the expected pace could provoke a whipping. As in all things, slaves needed to learn the balance: between working at their own pace and not provoking anger from their superiors.

  Much the same was true of face-to-face dealings with white people. Slaves were hectored and yelled at, haughtily and often angrily ordered to do this and that. But they were expected to remain mute. Of course, there was often the problem of language. Africans from a variety of societies and language groups worked side by side with local-born slaves who spoke their own patois, part European, part African and part local hybrid – and not all would be understood by their masters. More significantly perhaps, how did the slaves understand the language of the men and women ordering them to do this or that? Not understanding an alien tongue, not grasping what was demanded, was often a simple fact of life. But so too was playing dumb. It was not always in a slave’s interests to know exactly what was required of them: better to act ignorant or stupid, proceed at one’s own pace and direction. Until, that is, the next blow fell or the next order was bellowed in their direction. Acting stupid was built into slave routines. Equally, part of the slave owner’s creed was the belief that slaves were stupid, an idea that fed into the emergent racist view of Africans, which was itself a powerful buttress to the entire system. In any case, what benefit was it to the slave to be prompt and obedient, to work hard and be productive? What mattered, to them, was getting through the working day with the minimum of effort and without further trouble or harm. Being industrious and attentive were not qualities slaves sought to perfect – except when it was to their benefit or if it prevented trouble.

  The threat of violence, as we have seen, was the lubricant of the entire slave system and became an inescapable feature of the slaves’ working lives. Field slaves were marshalled at work by intimidating threats. The whip was everywhere. It was the slave drivers’ distinguishing tool; brandished as he walked or rode among the labourers and used to searing effect when needed – or whenever he felt like it. Counting the frequency of whippings might seem, at one level, both prurient and obscene. Yet here was the slave system at work; a labouring environment that periodically echoed to the crack of a whip. It was no accident that slave owners recorded and tabulated punishments, listing how many blows – ‘stripes’ to use the biblical phrase – were doled out to the slaves. They were lashed for any number of failings: for personal insults, for failing to keep up, for errors, back-sliding, or merely when the boss was angry and out of sorts. (In the sugar field, the driver using the whip was normally himself a slave.) Some men were infamous for their use of the whip, others used it sparingly. But few men working with slaves in the fields felt that they could manage the slaves without a whip.

  On many sugar plantations, the onerous fieldwork was made worse by the nature of the physical environment and by the planters’ failure to use animals for ploughing. All the heaviest work of digging, fertilising and planting was done by slave gangs, kept at work by drivers equipped with whips. The entire process was a highly regulated affair and it was the drivers’ job to ensure that the field hands kept to the planters’ timetable – encouraged by the whip. Sugar plantations evolved a code of conduct and punishment: who administered what kind of punishment – and to whom. Field slaves tended to be lashed on the spot for being tardy or unproductive. Punishments for more serious shortcomings (theft, for example) were ordered by senior plantation managers and were administered publicly. All this, of course, was in addition to unauthorised outbursts of personal antipathy and bad temper. Suspicious drivers, managers or owners often took out their suspicions on slaves: someone caught with sugar cane might easily be accused of theft – and lashed on the spot.[6]

  In all the major slave industries – tobacco, sugar, cotton, coffee – slaves felt the lash on their back. The list of offences seems endless: accidents caused by inattention, disobedience, running away, going slow – indeed anything that seemed subversive or threatening – all could provoke some form of corporal punishment. Outsiders often recoiled when they saw and heard the violence and unpredictability of such punishments, especially when inflicted on female slaves. Yet such violence was an ingrained feature of slave societies everywhere. It was so ingrained that those who administered it tended not even to notice it: it was simply part and parcel of the way slaves were managed and controlled. More literate and reflective planters (the men who kept journals, who wrote long letters and accounts of their daily working lives) recorded the violence done to their slaves almost in passing. Just as they recorded the amount of sunshine or rainfall,
they jotted down the number of lashes in a journal: mere facts of daily life in a slave society. Events that shock and startle the modern reader appear in the evidence as trivial and inconsequential incidents. A young pregnant woman – tired and resting in her cabin – dragged back to work shackled to a slave owner’s horse; a gang of slaves whip’d day by day’; a diary note that a slave might be executed ‘to terrify the rest’ – these and more were the commonplace jottings of successful slave owners.[7] Such remarks about extreme acts of violence reflect a deeply ingrained and unquestioned acceptance of cruelty in the day-to-day handling of enslaved people. More startling still to modern eyes, such slave owners were often well-educated, sophisticated and God-fearing men who saw nothing wrong, unethical or unchristian in dispensing savage (and what we might today think of as unchristian) treatment to their enslaved labourers.

  By the late eighteenth century, however, there was evidence that such punishments were frowned upon by increasing numbers of people. In the USA, the regular whipping of slaves was increasingly out of kilter with the morality of American society at large. Cruelty, formal or informal, was under attack on a wide front. An emergent feeling against cruelty (towards wives, children, criminals, animals) was evident in a number of Western societies. It was, for example, a major factor behind penal reform. Slavery itself came to be viewed as institutional cruelty and was denounced as such. Yet not only did US slavery thrive throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, but it continued to be lubricated by acts of cruelty that were themselves increasingly at odds with what was happening in the free states. Whipping had been a common form of legal and private punishment throughout North America until the early nineteenth century, but thereafter it found itself increasingly restricted to the slave states. What had once been unremarkable and acceptable was now unusual – except in slave societies. Now, it existed under the hostile gaze of outsiders. Visitors to the US slave South, to Brazil and to the Caribbean slave islands in the early nineteenth century were invariably offended and shocked by the sight and the sound of the lash on the slaves’ backs. Yet the people who owned the slaves, and those who managed them at work, still regarded the whip – amply illustrated in any number of contemporary paintings and sketches of slave life – as an essential aspect of labour discipline. It was the natural penalty for wrongdoing and laziness, for disobedience and defiance, and was thought essential for extracting the necessary effort at work. The whip remained indispensable to the way slavery functioned.

  The whip is the best-remembered act of violence done to the slaves. It had followed them on their long journey from Africa to the American plantations. It accompanied them on their daily tasks. Even when out of sight, it was rarely out of mind. It was the symbol of their servitude and suffering, and represented the mundane power of the people who claimed dominion over them. When it failed, when slave resistance threatened to disrupt the natural order, colonial militias, or informal armed gangs of neighbouring slave holders and friends, would impose their own violent control. If that failed, colonial and state authorities called upon the official military – all followed by a legal process that offered redress to no one but the slave holders.

  The penal codes of slave societies were savage in the extreme and remained so long after Western legal systems began their slow, hesitant progress to reform. Brutal retribution for slave violence or slave plotting took the form of heads and body parts displayed in places where other slaves could see them. Rebellious slaves who were not cut down by bands of armed slave holders, by the militia or by the military, faced an even worse fate after conviction: hanged, beheaded, gibbetted. And slaves’ testimony in court was not allowed in their own defence.

  These were, of course, the extremes of slavery and they did not come close to the experience of most slaves. But all slaves were in no doubt about the nature of the power their owners held over them. This goes some way to explaining why slaves sought to channel their defiance in ways that might not bring the wrath of the system down on them. Though slave rebellions were part of the history of slavery, they were the exception rather than the rule. But once again, this, in turn, leaves an unanswered question in the minds of many modern students: why did slaves not overthrow their masters? This also perplexed contemporaries. It was a question that audiences asked the American abolitionist Frederick Douglass in the mid-nineteenth century whenever he lectured on the violent evil of slavery. After all, slaves formed a majority in most slave regions, sometimes a massive majority. In agricultural work they had access to a collection of tools and equipment that could readily be used as weapons against their oppressors. The question naturally arises: if the oppression of slaves was as bad, as cruel and as brutal as we claim, why did they not revolt? It is even possible to turn this issue on its head: the absence of revolt might suggest that slaves were more settled and content than historians generally claim. After all, large-scale slave upheavals against their owners in the Americas were unusual. Slave owners provide an answer: they could never relax or drop their guard. They knew that the threat of slave trouble was never far away. It was an ever-present concern and prospect. Why else did Dr Johnson raise a toast, in 1777, ‘to the next insurrection of the negroes in the West Indies’?[8] Like everyone else, Johnson was aware that slave revolts had peppered that region – and knew that planters lived in fear of further eruptions.

  Fear of slave rebellion had been acute on the slave ships. We have evidence for some 500 shipboard rebellions. In 1704, the Africans on board the English ship Postillion, anchored in the Gambia River, rose up, attacking the crew with staves: they were crushed when the crew fired into the crowd, following up with a cutlass attack. Thirty-three Africans died in the fighting or by drowning. Eighty died in a rebellion on the Duke of Cambridge, ten years later. Sometimes the losses were catastrophic – on both sides. In 1730, the Boston ship William was overwhelmed with the loss of the entire crew: ‘murther’d by the Negro’s they had brought on Board’.[9] Some of the rebellions on land in the Americas had very limited aims, but others were more sweeping and ambitious. Slave owners, however, feared the worst: they feared the risk of escalation and contagion. A small rebellious band driven to violent despair on one property might easily provide a spark, attract supporters elsewhere and coalesce into a large body of armed slaves posing a widespread danger. Hence they felt the need to nip slave revolt in the bud in the most savage and draconian fashion.

  The massive slave upheavals we find in Brazil and the Caribbean were not repeated in North America, but revolts (and, more common, widespread fear of slave revolts) dotted North American slave history. Slave owners could not shake off the fear that unrest might get out of control. There was Bacon’s rebellion of 1676 in Virginia (when slaves joined forces with indentured white workers), the Stono rebellion in South Carolina in 1739 (with Angolan slaves trying to reach the freedom of Spanish Florida), later the Gabriel rebellion in Virginia in 1800, a rising of some 200 slaves in Louisiana in 1811, and Denmark Vesey’s revolt (1822) in Charleston. Most famous of all perhaps was Nat Turner’s rebellion (in which about eighty rebels were involved and sixty whites killed) in Virginia in 1831. All these revolts led to ferocious retribution on the spot and, after subsequent onesided trials, this was followed by a tightening of local slave laws. Turner’s rebellion was to prove the last major slave revolt in US history, despite the fact that, at the time, slavery was expanding rapidly throughout the cotton belt.

  However we look at North American slave revolts (the numbers of slaves involved, the levels of violence and the scale and intensity of retribution), they are markedly different from events in the Caribbean. In Antigua, the conspiracy of 173 5–6, Tacky’s revolt in Jamaica in 1760, Fédon’s revolt in Grenada in 1795: all involved large numbers of slaves, and desperate and sometimes protracted fighting by colonial forces to suppress the upheavals. All were defeated and all were followed by bloody reprisals – in the field or after legal hearings (where accused slaves stood no realistic chance of receiving a fai
r hearing). Time and again, dozens of slaves were executed, often after protracted torture (being broken on the wheel, for example). And, again, severed heads and body parts were liberally distributed for other enslaved people to witness. The lucky slaves caught up in failed revolts were those transported to remote colonies and regions. The conclusion seemed clear: revolt could lead only to prolonged suffering and death. Planters and colonial officials seemed to relish the barbaric rituals played out in the aftermath of a slave revolt, but, in fact, their reprisals were a reflection of their deep-seated fears about the slaves. They also suggest a paucity of ideas about how to cope with slave unrest.

  Slaves’ violent reactions were, then, the extreme element of slave defiance – and that defiance was an integral aspect of slave life in the Americas. Conceived in the violence done to millions of Africans during their enslavement and transportation, it was nurtured and shaped in the hardships of daily life across the Americas. The determination to cope with the injustices of bondage spawned a multitude of slave responses, from the simplest of personal insolence and truculence through to the extremes of collective violence. But it had to be tempered by the stark understanding of what happened to the slave who crossed the line; who reared up in anger – and failed.

  This entire story – of slave defiance and the slave owners’ fear of slave defiance – changed utterly in the last years of the eighteenth century. The French Revolution in 1789 and the upheavals in St-Domingue after 1791 transformed the enslaved Americas. Events in Haiti were the realisation of the slave owners’ worst nightmares, and they haunted the subsequent history of slavery across the hemisphere. But Haiti meant something quite different for those who continued to endure a life of bondage. Haiti and its revolutionary leaders, its myths and realities, became a potent and encouraging image for slaves everywhere. Their masters viewed it with dread; it was the inevitable outcome of not dealing firmly with slave defiance.