Four Hundred Souls
Page 15
By October 1779, the American colonists had suffered 752 casualties. When the French tried to lend some naval support, the prepared British sank six French ships in the Savannah River—a humiliating and costly loss for French general Count d’Estaing. D’Estaing’s army of 3,600 contained 545 people of African descent, many from Saint Domingue (later Haiti). An estimated 1,094 of these soldiers, including 650 French troops, lost their lives.
One of the reasons for the British success is that they also used African American guides and laborers. Quimano Dolly was one African American who helped the British capture Savannah by bringing troops through a swamp area behind the city. At the end of the war, nearly four thousand people of African descent left Savannah and headed to Florida, the Caribbean, and Canada.
But many Black people remained. Today African Americans represent 54 percent of the population, the First African Baptist Church still stands, and the battle sites of the American Revolution are recognized in city parks, on historical landmarks, and through the oral traditions of Africans and their descendants. The freedom dreams of the Revolutionary War remain the freedom dreams of today.
1784–1789
THE U.S. CONSTITUTION
Donna Brazile
My name is Richard Allen. I was born enslaved and died a Methodist bishop.
I am an African, and an American. In my lifetime, 1760–1831, I had two enslavers. Both were relatively good men by my own standards and those of my fellow citizens. Still, slavery was a bitter pill to swallow.
My emotions never accepted that my mind, my learning, my labor, my character, my hands, were someone’s personal property. Beginning with the first awareness of my condition, I thought without rest of freedom. I often felt that one day I would be free.
Benjamin Chew of Philadelphia was my first owner. When I was eight, he sold my parents, my siblings, and me to a Delaware planter of modest means. Stokley Sturgis and his wife were aging, kind people. They didn’t work me very hard. In fact, I didn’t know hard work until I left them to earn back my body.
When I was ten, the Boston Massacre took place. All people, both enslaved and free, were living and moving and breathing in an ether of expectation. It hit me hard that Crispus Attucks, a man like me, was the first to give his life. In 1776 we learned the news that the Declaration of Independence was signed and issued. Its message had a deep impact.
The following year, at age seventeen, I became severely aware of my personal deficiencies, my moral shortcomings. They weighed heavily. I struggled daily with these feelings. Then Freeborn Garretson, a white preacher, came. I listened and converted to Methodism.
I was hungry for spiritual discipline and guidance. I took Scripture to heart, especially the teachings of Christ. They were words to live by, and I lived by them.
My life changed.
Then Sturgis’s life changed. He had been attending our meetings when, at one of them, Reverend Garretson said that slave owners had been “weighed in the balance and found wanting.” That struck Sturgis squarely in the heart. He saw he could no longer own slaves.
Sturgis told me I should leave, find work, and pay him what he had paid for me. By age twenty-six in 1786, I had bought my body, literally earned my freedom.
It was in some ways harder to be a free man. Now—no mistake—the ideals of the American Revolution, the words of the Declaration, had triggered the fall of slavery in the northern states.
Although unable to endure the hypocrisy of slavery, most northern white citizens could not bring themselves to be social equals. Accordingly, they did all they could to squelch opportunity for free American Africans.
I felt for those newly freed. Few whites would make loans to buy homes. Those who did, mostly abolitionist Quakers, were tight in reviewing and granting them. It was hard to get jobs. It was hard just to live. We even found it hard to be dead—we were not allowed to own cemeteries in which to bury our deceased.
This conflict, dealing with the hypocrisy of slavery while building a foundation of “All men are created equal,” was an ongoing contest throughout the country. It became the primary discord at the Constitutional Convention.
“A nation, without a national government, is, in my view, an awful spectacle,” wrote Alexander Hamilton. If the United States were to survive as a nation, it would need a central government. That reality, that overriding necessity, drove the convention’s compromises with slavery.
Because of my faith, I was less judgmental and more forgiving than were many about this hypocrisy. We were instructed to “do good” to those who hated and despitefully misused us. Those weren’t just words; they were a command. I obeyed.
With other American Africans, I had been attending services at St. George’s in Philadelphia. One Sunday an elder was standing at the door and told us to go to the gallery. We took seats in the same location as where we used to sit downstairs. No sooner had we touched our seats than a prayer was announced, so we got on our knees.
I was focused on the prayer when I heard a commotion of tussling and angry low voices. I looked up to see a trustee pulling my friend and colleague, Absalom Jones, off his knees, saying, “You must not kneel here!”
Jones said he would get up when prayer was finished. The trustee would not have that. Jones was told to rise immediately or he would be forced to rise. The prayer ended just then.
We rose as one and left as one, never to return to St. George’s. The abuse and affront were the harder to bear since we had contributed largely of our monies and given our labor generously to laying the church floor and building the gallery.
We were shut out of St. George’s by 1787. The Constitutional Convention was in town. There, too, we were shut out. The most vigorous debates were over allowing slavery without building it into our new institutions.
I read the U.S. Constitution. Nowhere are the words slave or slavery to be found. Abraham Lincoln later told a Cooper Union audience that “this mode of alluding to slaves and slavery, instead of speaking of them, was employed on purpose to exclude from the Constitution the idea that there could be property in man.”
It is an honest and realistic argument that slavery became incorporated into the Constitution without naming it because slavery was considered on its way to extinction. To many, the Constitutional Convention compromises were but a temporary accommodation.
Some see only the hypocrisy. They admit of no decent impulses at all in the convention’s compromises—and refuse to tolerate slavery’s existence for a while longer as a necessity, with the intent that it should in time be no more.
But named or not, slavery was there in writing, a presence allowed by the Constitution. As for myself, I had been owned by good men who wouldn’t be able to see their own sin for years. But I knew of my own sins. And I have a Lord who commands me to forgive. So I forgave and did not sit in judgment.
While I did not judge souls, I did judge behavior. It was my decision, and that of my fellow worshipers, never to return to St. George’s Methodist Church. Jones and I, therefore, sought to establish a Free African Society (FAS) based on faith but not affiliated with any church. Today it would be called nondenominational. Following the example of the Constitution, we drew up a preamble, then outlined its purpose and functions.
The FAS would be a self-help group for those recently freed African Americans who were adrift in a hostile society that actively sought to deny them opportunities to advance. The society cultivated and mentored new leaders. It formed a warm community, provided a social life, constructed a network of people who cared.
It was needed. In 1780 there were but 240 freed Americans of African descent in Philadelphia. But by the next census ten years later, the city had 1,849 freed men and women.
I am greatly satisfied that FAS served as a model for many leaders and prophets who would come after me, including W.E.B. Du Bois and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
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nbsp; When we withdrew from St. George’s, we rented a storeroom to continue worshiping. This was much opposed by a church leader who visited us twice on the subject, using persuasion ranging from belittling to beseeching.
There are several twists to this story, but the ending is that we settled on a lot on Fifth Street, where I later turned the first shovel for construction. This led, eventually, to the first Independent African church in April 1816, an institution that continues to this day, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, consisting of 2.5 million members.
It saddens me that with all the blood spilled—drawn first by the lash, then by the sword, later drained by dogs, clubs, bombs, and guns during the civil rights era—today the federal courts are reversing the human rights gains so long in coming, so dearly won. And doing it with the facade that racism is no longer with us.
I was a poor vessel whom God used to give gifts to his oppressed—the tools to free them. American Africans have served a vital function in this democracy. We have been the flint against which the Almighty has sparked this country’s struggle to live out the proposition that “all men are created equal.”
Whether we are entering a period of regression, or are on the verge of reaching the mountaintop, the tools He gave me are still available: self-help groups, faith and self-discipline, community, and moral leadership as constants from the home to the nation.
1789–1794
SALLY HEMINGS
Annette Gordon-Reed
In August 1789, Sally Hemings was living at the Hôtel de Langeac on the rue de Berri, just off the Champs-Élysées in Paris. She had arrived about two years earlier after living in London for two weeks at the home of John and Abigail Adams.
Hemings had accompanied Mary (Polly) Jefferson, the nine-year-old daughter of Thomas Jefferson, on an Atlantic voyage from Virginia that lasted five weeks. Jefferson was in Paris serving as the American minister to France. John Adams was the American minister in London. He and his wife had agreed to receive Jefferson’s daughter and her traveling companion, and to keep Polly until her father could arrive and bring her to Paris.
Jefferson had asked for a “careful Negro woman” to accompany Polly. Then the woman was to return to Virginia. He had suggested Isabel Hern, who was about twenty-eight years old. Hern was unable to make the trip, having recently given birth. So Jefferson’s in-laws, Francis and Elizabeth Eppes, with whom Polly and Sally were staying, sent fourteen-year-old Sally Hemings instead.
In the convoluted world of Virginia slavery and family, Sally Hemings’s father was John Wayles, the father of Jefferson’s deceased wife, Martha, and also of Elizabeth Eppes. So the little girl whom Hemings helped bring across the ocean was her half-niece. When she arrived in Paris, Hemings joined her brother James, who had been in the city since 1784, having come over with Jefferson and Jefferson’s eldest daughter, Martha (Patsy).
A great deal had taken place during Hemings’s stay in Paris, both within the Hôtel de Langeac and outside it. France had witnessed the fall of the Bastille in July 1789, which is often seen as the beginning of the French Revolution. In truth, much had been happening on that front since Hemings’s arrival. The signs of discord in the society were everywhere. Demonstrators amassed in the neighborhood where Hemings lived, outside her residence, actually, shouting about the new world that was to come. Paris was on fire with talk of politics among men and women of all classes.
Hemings’s neighborhood was a relatively new one, and though the overall number of Black people in Paris was small, the section of Paris where the Hôtel de Langeac was located had the city’s largest concentration of people of color. It was an active community whose members kept tabs on one another’s fortunes, alerting each other to developments that were taking place in their community.
Perhaps people kept tabs on the fate of Sally Hemings. As her son Madison Hemings explained, during her time in Paris she had become “Mr. Jefferson’s concubine.” It is not known when this occurred, but the evidence indicates that it was near the end of her time in the city. In fact, it is very likely that by August 1789, sixteen-year-old Hemings was either newly pregnant or about to become pregnant.
Jefferson had been planning a leave of absence to return his daughters and, most likely, Hemings to Virginia. He was set to come back to Paris and finish his time as minister. When Hemings learned of Jefferson’s plans, she balked. She was not alone; none of the young people who were living at the hotel—Jefferson’s daughters and his protégé William Short, who had come from Virginia to be Jefferson’s secretary—wanted to leave. James Hemings could expect to return with Jefferson.
The Hemings siblings knew that the law in France gave them an easy shot at freedom. Jefferson knew this, too, and was defensive about it, which is probably why he paid both Hemings siblings wages, and paid them well. James was the chef de cuisine at the Hôtel de Langeac, and Sally was lady’s maid to Jefferson’s daughters and likely Jefferson’s chambermaid.
It was a heady time for both brother and sister. They were nominally free, receiving wages near the top of the scale for French servants, and living in the midst of a revolution that promised a new world for people on the bottom of the social scale. Hemings had her own money, but Jefferson had started buying her clothing, and there is reason to think she was attending balls with Patsy Jefferson as an attendant.
Both Hemings siblings would have had every reason to think they had a chance to make it in the new society being born. James hired a tutor to teach him proper French. It is not known whether Sally was included, though her son mentioned her facility with the language. Most important, Sally Hemings did not want to be enslaved again. Jefferson wanted to bring her back to Virginia, and when he met with her resistance, he promised her that if she came home with him, she would live a life of privilege, and that any children they had would be free upon reaching the age of twenty-one. Madison Hemings said that his mother “implicitly relied” on Jefferson’s promises and decided to return to Virginia.
Hemings, her brother James, and the Jeffersons set sail for the United States in October 1789. They landed in Norfolk, Virginia, in November. After visiting relatives, the group arrived at Monticello just before Christmas. The next reference to Sally Hemings in Jefferson’s records is a letter written around September 1790, saying that at some point in the spring, she had been too ill to make a trip. Other letters from that time make clear that Hemings’s status had changed: she ceased to be a lady’s maid for Jefferson’s daughters once they returned to the United States. It is not known when Hemings gave birth, but the child she had upon her return to Virginia apparently did not survive infancy.
As things turned out, Jefferson did not return to Paris. He accepted President Washington’s invitation to serve as U.S. secretary of state and left for New York, then the nation’s capital, in March 1790. James Hemings, who continued to be paid regular wages, accompanied him. They were soon joined by Robert Hemings, the eldest of the Hemings-Wayles children. Sally Hemings remained at Monticello and disappears from Jefferson family records. When the capital moved to Philadelphia temporarily, starting in 1791, the Hemings brothers continued to work for Jefferson. Jefferson referred to Sally Hemings in a letter instructing that she was to be sent the bedding she used while in France.
Jefferson’s position as secretary of state kept him away from Monticello a great deal from 1790 until his retirement in 1794. In fact, during that four-year period, he was at Monticello a total of only about five nonconsecutive months. Hemings conceived no children during this time. She likely spent this period with her mother and the rest of her family. She did not become pregnant again until Jefferson retired from Washington’s cabinet and returned home at the end of 1794. Hemings conceived her second child in January 1795. She would, in the word of a visitor to Monticello, “cohabit” with Jefferson for thirty-seven years, bearing seven children, four of whom lived to adulthood, all of whom were freed when they bec
ame adults.
1794–1799
THE FUGITIVE SLAVE ACT
Deirdre Cooper Owens
In 1788 a new Western nation established itself as a fledgling republic that privileged the democratic process for its most respected citizens: white male property owners over twenty-one years old. At the cornerstone of its democratic process was the vote. Overwhelmingly, white male voters created clauses in the U.S. Constitution that attended to slavery, one of the new nation’s most pressing political issues. Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3 of the Constitution not only protected slavery as an American institution but also protected slave owners whose human property liberated themselves into either free states or territories.
In 1789 voters elected their first president, the former general and Revolutionary War hero George Washington. He was one of the wealthiest and most politically connected slave owners in the United States, whose presence eventually established the presidency as a position that was amenable to men who made up what would later be known as the slaveocracy—the slave-owning ruling class that ran the country. It comes as no surprise that from 1789, when Washington was elected, until 1877, when General Ulysses Grant ended his presidency under Reconstruction, more American presidents (twelve) owned slaves than those who did not (six). As a result of the seemingly enduring and lucrative industry based on human bondage, the United States gave birth to a small but politically mighty abolitionist movement.
During the early 1790s, powerful slave owners put more teeth into Article IV of the Constitution to protect their assets, enslaved people. In 1793 Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which deemed it a federal crime to aid any fugitive from slavery: