by Tiya Miles
As the holdover name announced, forced work was an integral part of the punishment package. Inmates were made to perform hard labor under the threat of still more whipping. City planners innovated in order to make punishment pay bigger dividends. Starting in 1825, wardens at the Work House directed enslaved inmates to power a massive milling wheel. Women and men marched on the treadmill that turned the mill for nearly eight hours a day, with breaks of only a few minutes each, whips tearing at their backs, faced with the constant risk that their limbs might get caught in the metal spokes and ripped from them. On the wheel, enslaved people cracked whole ears of corn, which the city then sold.19 Charleston earned doubly from the suffering of enslaved people: fees collected from owners and profits procured for milled corn. Meanwhile, planters and urban dwellers called this system of punishment “being sent for a little sugar.”20 The childlike euphemism obfuscated the cruelty and perhaps even sadism while hearkening back to the temporary period when the Work House had been housed in a sugar factory after the previous building burned down. This was southern gothic horror made real, reflecting an inner commitment to blind profiteering at Charleston’s civic and moral core.21
Old Charleston Jail, north side. This dilapidated structure is now a tourist attraction and the purported location of ghost sightings. Photograph by Michael Rivera via Wikimedia Commons, 2019.
Carolina rice and cotton elites carried the banner of an American brand of authoritarianism that we like to forget ever existed. Despite the principles of equality and liberty espoused by the American Revolution, South Carolinians—or, at least, the ones who wrote laws and wielded whips—reestablished a long-held “norm of inequality” even as northern states introduced gradual emancipation laws and mid-Atlantic states loosened manumission requirements. Slavery was just too lucrative for powerful Carolinians to relinquish. The norm of inequality, influenced by English aristocratic roots and undergirded by slavery, penetrated electoral politics in the state, where only privileged white men had formal influence.
From their seat of economic power in Charleston and political authority in Columbia (which succeeded Charleston as capital in 1786), Carolina “planter-politicians” presided over the most undemocratic society ever sustained in this country, a society where patriarchal ideology fueled oligarchy, the rule of a few wealthy men from old, aristocratic families. Here, super-rich slaveholders “monopolized not only state but also local offices.” They controlled the bodies of slaves and wives, as well as all posts in the governor’s mansion and statehouse. They directed elections and government operations to the extent that South Carolina became “the only state in the Union that did not have a two-party system or popular elections for the presidency, the governor, and a host of state and local offices.” Instead, candidates for key offices (including presidential electors) were appointed by the state legislature, which was dominated by planters, due to large minimum land requirements, and, in the case of state representatives, minimum slave property requirements.22 South Carolina was, as many historians and commentators have pointed out, an exaggerated version of the undemocratic slaveholding South and typified its ambition to maintain an extreme gap between the (all-white) haves and the (mostly colored) have-nots in the right to life, liberty, and enjoyment. In that gap lay the fate of thousands of Black children, whose existences, and the quality of all the days of their young lives, would be deemed expendable.
SAYING HER NAME
Except that she will wind up sold, a victim of the auction block, Ashley’s lyrical name is nearly all we know about her. Ashley (an uncommon name for enslaved people in the Carolinas and for women of any race in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America) was usually reserved for Anglo men like Anthony Ashley Cooper, the lord proprietor who championed English settlement in Carolina and became the namesake of the two rivers that formed Charleston’s peninsular arch.23 Might Rose’s daughter have been named for a river that was named for a man whose venture inaugurated Carolina slavery? And who would bestow such a name on an enslaved baby girl in the decades before the Civil War?
Enslavers tended to name their human property in ways that reaffirmed their own status and authority while simultaneously demeaning the people named. The result was a denial of enslaved people’s surnames, a slew of personal names that were the shortened form of European names (like Beck, Harry, or Jenny), names more fitting for household pets (like Hero, Cupid, or Captain), and names reminiscent of classical figures (like Dido, Caesar, or Venus). The excision of surnames had the effect of rhetorically severing Black family lines, erasing rights of natal belonging, and denying maturity in adulthood. The bestowal of diminutive nicknames or cutesy pet names belittled recipients as perpetual children or domesticated animals rather than recognizing them as the subjects who would mature into their own lives. Enslavers also appreciated, perhaps, their own sardonic wit in naming people with little social power after characters with great cultural recognition. Every time a master or mistress called upon “Hercules,” “Samson,” or “Prince,” they rubbed enslaved people’s noses in the shame of their assigned inferiority.24
In subtle and sometimes secret opposition, kin to unfree children also gave babies names. These affectionate appellations were sometimes known as “basket names.” Parents bestowed honor names after family members, both living and dead. Loved ones called children by names derived from African languages (like Affy, Quanimo, or Mingo), or by names for the day or season when a child was born, or for meaningful places. Although the precision of “day names” (that is, a practice in which a person born on a certain day, such as Friday, was called some derivation of Pheba or Phoebe) and of seasonal names (children called September, for instance, if born in that month) was fading by the nineteenth century, the names themselves continued to be popular (in that a baby born in winter might be called Autumn). These Black cultural practices of naming stood against the names of “contempt” chosen by enslavers, and are revealed by the many individuals named Monday, April, November, February, July, May, Autumn, and Winter in the records of South Carolina planters.25 Though it wasn’t as common as using day names and seasonal names, Black relatives also named children after places, like Boston, Africa, or Paris.26 Calling a child Ashley after a nearby river would parallel this practice. Still, we know nothing conclusive. Rose’s Ashley may have been named by the Martins to reflect her lowly status as a child for whom the English name Ashley was humorously ill-fitting, or Ashley may well have carried a place-name given by a loved one of African descent. Such were the complex cultural filaments of what, borrowing from Harriet Jacobs, we might call the “tangled skeins” of slavery.27
From her unusual name, we gather not only the complexity of Ashley’s cultural context but also the greater circumstantial evidence indicating that she was born in the vicinity and environs of Charleston.28 But as a form of legal “movable property,” Ashley could and would be transported far from the place of her birth. The Ashley whose name appears in Robert Martin’s estate inventory would spend most of her life in the South Carolina interior, more than a hundred miles distant from the coast. As a young child, Ashley was likely separated from her mother, Rose, and installed on the Martins’ cotton estate, Milberry Place Plantation, in the “middle country” district of Barnwell, South Carolina. The estate inventory of 1853, our single source for Ashley’s location, lists owned people on the premises by family groupings.29 The word “family,” though, takes multiple shapes and forms, especially in the stained documents of slavery.
The use of the term “one family” as an organizing schema on the Martins’ slave register reflects as much or more about slaveholder conceptions and priorities (such as how to measure “increases among their slaves and allocate rations”) as it does about enslaved people’s notions of kin.30 This list may have reflected biological ties among the Black residents at Milberry as perceived by the Martins or their estate manager, and these biological links might have been fi
rst compelled by the Martins through arranged, but legally unrecognized, slave “marriages” and coerced sexual relations (crudely referred to by some owners as “breeding”). Or “one family” could have reflected unrelated individuals assigned to reside together in the slave cabins of the quarters. It may also—or alternatively—have reflected clusters of close-knit people called kin by one another, whether biological or socio-emotional (as in adopted family or “fictive kin”). We cannot conclude from this record that enslaved family units were actual or sustained on the Milberry plantation, nor can we assume that strong family units and prolonged family ties were impossible there. Some plantation owners did structure or encourage the formation and enlargement of intact family units, while others routinely or sporadically separated Black family members through sale.
Robert Martin’s financial records indicate that he sold people singly, but he also may have recognized, and to a certain extent preserved, African American family groupings. Ashley is included in this line on the Martin estate inventory: “Toney 100, Vinney 50, Mary 500, Emma 500, Ashley 300, Levy 250——one family 1700.” It is plausible that Toney and Vinney were elderly grandparents to Mary, Emma, Ashley, and Levy, given the low monetary values ascribed by the auditor.31 At $500 each, Mary and Emma would have been young women in their prime, likely appointed to labor in the cotton fields. Ashley and Levy’s values, set at $300 and $250, suggest that they were children old enough to perform discrete tasks but too young for heavy cotton-picking quotas. Was Rose once part of this unit—daughter to Toney and Vinney, sister to Mary and Emma, and mother to Ashley—plucked from there to serve in the Charleston manor house? Or did Robert Martin purchase her expressly for use in the urban mansion, due to her youth, pleasing appearance, or domestic skills with the needle or cookpot? If Rose was procured for service in the city, and if she gave birth to Ashley in Charleston, her daughter may have been transplanted to the country estate and lodged with other enslaved family members. Ashley could have been biologically related to those listed with her as “one family” or linked through relations of care that made kin out of blood strangers. If Ashley was born in Charleston and taken from Rose at an early age, she would have been far from her birth mother when absorbed into Toney and Vinney’s clan, and she would have lost an extended circle of care when placed on the auction block following Robert Martin’s death.
Stone auction block. Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, partial gift of Mr. and Mrs. Sean P. Guy. This artifact, from Hagerstown, Maryland, was on display beside Ashley’s sack at the time of this writing.
An auction block was a real thing. We sometimes forget this. We allow the physicality of a rock worn smooth by time and the press of bare, stolen feet to slip from our awareness. But these mundane things—a concrete block, a wooden set, a hollow stump—were props for the ritual dehumanization of a people. Much like the “uniform” of Negro cloth, the auction block set a group apart in order to lower their social status and justify their contemptuous treatment. The rock or stump functioned like a department store window where “the human-commodity is put on display,” raised up and set apart.32 The auction block’s structuring presence made one thing clear: if you were someone who could be treated to the indignity of sale, then you were barely a person at all. The Black men, women, and children framed as separate and rendered as passive became seeable, touchable, and testable by any buyer with the means to enter the market. And those buyers looked to purchase not only Black people but also an idea of themselves as richer, more powerful, more virile, and kinder.33 With the promise of irresistible pecuniary payoffs and psychological dividends, first-time buyers and experienced collectors invested small fortunes to acquire slaves. By the early 1800s, these transactions had grown into an industry complete with traders, investors, accountants, warehouses, private showrooms, and painted company shingles dangling outside the slave mart door.
In the decades before the Civil War, cotton agriculture underwent changes that thrust hundreds of thousands of African Americans onto auction blocks. Technological innovation (the cotton gin) sped up processing potential and introduced new and brutal forms of punishment (like whippings in the cotton rows for slower pace of movement). And as the price of cotton spiked in these decades (with a plunge in the late 1830s and 1840s followed by recovery), easy credit circulated through local networks, national banks, and foreign entities for the purchase of the one thing that kept the whole raucous venture rolling: Black people in pain.34
From the perspective of a Black family made more vulnerable by the growth of the cotton industry, the 1850s would have been a terrible time for an owner to die, potentially thrusting the family members into the market. This decade marked the height of westward-bound cotton frenzy and spikes in the capital value of slaves. If a master or mistress saw reversals of health or fortune at this moment, Black families would, more likely than not, suffer the heartbreak of separation. In the years just before the Civil War, more than two million unfree women, men, and children were yanked from their home places and thrown into a whirling market that landed them elsewhere in their states or across state lines.35 Ashley was one of them.
Most traffic in the domestic slave trade was heading westward into the fertile lands of interior South Carolina and Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Missouri, made plentiful as a result of violent Indigenous expulsion. Enslaved people sent “down the river” toward the Mississippi Delta would face a kind of slavery much worse, if such a thing can be imagined, than the variety they had suffered in the established eastern rice and tobacco zones. In these southwestern “frontier” lands where newcomers to the slaveholding classes sought fortunes in cotton, the established customs of eastern formality and restraint, such as they were, fell away. Landholders tried to squeeze more labor out of their owned humans with as little additional financial input as possible. The urban context of Charleston, while characterized by surveillance and the threat of state-sponsored punishment, had at least imposed expectations of social acceptability. As slavery moved west, living quarters were more squalid; food rations were smaller and less varied; “free” time was reduced; and violent corrections increased. When cotton fetched astronomical prices and credit flowed like water, white owners looked upon Black workers as crop-producing, slave-baby-birthing, wealth-making machines, denying them even the modest allowances or concessions that had been customary along the coastline.
The middle zone of South Carolina, between the coast and the mountainous piedmont region near the Georgia border, lay in the direct path of slavery’s expansion and had provided the first spaces of new white-owner and Black-slave settlement. These had been the homelands of the Cherokee and Creek nations, whose grounds spanned Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama prior to the pressured signing of treaties in the 1820s and the passage of the Indian Removal Act under President Andrew Jackson in 1830. Rice did not thrive here; nor did sea island cotton. Short-staple cotton became the lucrative mass crop. The Savannah and Edisto rivers, together with a net of swift streams and stagnant swamps, cut through this flat land, forested with pines and poplars.36 A traveler passing through the Barnwell District, where Robert Martin owned land, in 1843 glumly described “the forest of gigantic long-leaved pine” that possessed “a beauty & even sublimity which is rarely surpassed” but lamented that the trees were being exposed to “useless & unprofitable destruction.” Many of these pine trees, on tracts disparaged as “pine barren” by landowning settlers, would be felled by the edge of the blade and the bulk of enslaved people’s muscle amid sweltering summer heat.37
This was the future Ashley faced in inland South Carolina, along with the other captives on the Martins’ premises. Following Robert Martin’s passing, Milberry Serena Martin began liquidating the family estate “for the purpose of Partition,” as required by the terms of her late husband’s will as well as lawsuits brought against the estate by his f
ormer business colleague.38 She sold her namesake plantation in Barnwell (the 2,951-acre estate was later recovered and occupied by her son Robert Martin, Jr.), as well as a hotel and several land lots in the railroad town of Aiken, located in the Barnwell District. She also sold various lots in Charleston and along the wharf to several buyers, including the city of Charleston, her son-in-law Joseph Aiken, and the slave trader Thomas Gadsden.39 It was this virtual big tent sale, a whirling dervish of court appearances and property transactions presided over by Milberry Martin, that sealed the fate of the people she owned.
Ashley, at just nine years old, must have been gathered up in this squall of the Martin household transformation, after which her mother, Rose, was lost to her. But what can this kind of senseless, existential break have meant for a real, living child? It is nearly impossible for many of us to fathom. Elizabeth Keckley, who eventually purchased her freedom through sewing, recalled childhood emotions upon the division of her family that we cannot adequately convey. “The announcement fell upon the little circle in that rude-log cabin like a thunderbolt,” Keckley remembered when recounting the separation from her father, who was being moved west by his owner. “The shadow eclipsed the sunshine, and love brought despair. The parting was eternal….We who are crushed to earth with heavy chains, who travel a weary, rugged, thorny road, groping through midnight darkness on earth, earn our right to enjoy the sunshine in the great hereafter.”40