AS PER YOUR REQUEST, HERE ARE MOST OF THE SLAVERY DOCUMENTS WE EXAMINED IN CLASS

SCHMOLL/HISTORY231/DOCUMENT BASED WORK ON SLAVERY

1. One Englishman, William Harrison, wrote, (wm harrison) "As for slaves and bondmen, we have none, naie such is the privilege of our countrie, by the especiall grace of God and bountie of our princes, that if anie come hither from other realms, so soone as they set foot on land they become so free of condition as their master , whereby all note of servile bondage is removed from them."     (1577, written about England)

2. Sarah Frances Shaw Graves, Age 87 "I was born March 23, 1850 in Kentucky, somewhere near Louisville. I am goin' on 88 years right now. (1937). I was brought to Missouri when I was six months old, along with my mama, who was a slave owned by a man named Shaw, who had allotted her to a man named Jimmie Graves, who came to Missouri to live with his daughter Emily Graves Crowdes. I always lived with Emily Crowdes."

The matter of allotment was confusing to the interviewer and Aunt Sally endeavored to explain.

"Yes'm. Allotted? Yes'm. I'm goin' to explain that, " she replied. "You see there was slave traders in those days, jes' like you got horse and mule an' auto traders now. They bought and sold slaves and hired 'em out. Yes'm, rented 'em out. Allotted means somethin' like hired out. But the slave never got no wages. That all went to the master. The man they was allotted to paid the master."

"I was never sold. My mama was sold only once, but she was hired out many times. Yes'm when a slave was allotted, somebody made a down payment and gave a mortgage for the rest. A chattel mortgage. . . ."

"Allotments made a lot of grief for the slaves," Aunt Sally asserted. "We left my papa in Kentucky, 'cause he was allotted to another man. My papa never knew where my mama went, an' my mama never knew where papa went." Aunt Sally paused a moment, then went on bitterly. "They never wanted mama to know, 'cause they knowed she would never marry so long she knew where he was. Our master wanted her to marry again and raise more children to be slaves. They never wanted mama to know where papa was, an' she never did," sighed Aunt Sally.

3. Sarah Gudger, Age 121  

I 'membahs de time when mah mammy wah alive, I wah a small chile, afoah dey tuck huh t' Rims Crick. All us chillens wah playin' in de ya'd one night. Jes' arunnin' an' aplayin' lak chillun will. All a sudden mammy cum to de do' all a'sited. "Cum in heah dis minnit," she say. "Jes look up at what is ahappenin'," and bless yo' life, honey, da sta's wah fallin' jes' lak rain.* Mammy wah tebble skeered, but we chillen wa'nt afeard, no, we wa'nt afeard. But mammy she say evah time a sta' fall, somebuddy gonna die. Look lak lotta folks gonna die f'om de looks ob dem sta's. Ebbathin' wah jes' as bright as day. Yo' cudda pick a pin up. Yo' know de sta's don' shine as bright as dey did back den. I wondah wy dey don'. Dey jes' don' shine as bright. Wa'nt long afoah dey took mah mammy away, and I wah lef' alone.

4. Charley Williams, Age 94

When de day begin to crack de whole plantation break out wid all kinds of noises, and you could tell what going on by de kind of noise you hear.

Come de daybreak you hear de guinea fowls start potracking down at the edge of de woods lot, and den de roosters all start up 'round de barn and de ducks finally wake up and jine in. You can smell de sow belly frying down at the cabins in de "row," to go wid de hoecake and de buttermilk.

Den purty soon de wind rise a little, and you can hear a old bell donging way on some plantation a mile or two off, and den more bells at other places and maybe a horn, and purty soon younder go old Master's old ram horn wid a long toot and den some short toots, and here come de overseer down de row of cabins, hollering right and left, and picking de ham out'n his teeth wid a long shiny goose quill pick.

Bells and horns! Bells for dis and horns for dat! All we knowed was go and come by de bells and horns!

5. SOME SLAVERY STATISTICS:

Slaves as a percentage of Virginia's total population in 1680: 7

Slaves as a percentage of Virginia's total population in 1720: 30
Slaves as a percentage of Virginia's total population in 1770: 42
Number of slaves in Virginia in 1750: 100,000
Number of slaves in Virginia in 1850: 200,000

9.

Charles City County, VA Slave Schedule - 1860 Census
(Number next to name is number of slaves owned - names are listed in order of appearance in census)
Valentine Walker, 7 William H. Hearwood, 7 John L. Parsons, 3 Anthony H. Lamb, 15 Junius Lamb, 3 Jacob Vaiden, 9 Ann E. Vaiden, 9 Thomas H. Wilcox, 1 Thomas J. Mocock, 2 William J. Billifont, 4 Adolphus Goddin, 4 Wyatt B. Walker, 8 Edward T. Haynes, 3 William H. A. Southall, 17 James E. Holdcraft, 3 William F. Walker, 17 Beverly F. Harwood, 3 John M. Harwood, 3 George W. Vaiden, 7 Susan A. Martin, 1 Pleasant D. Ellett, 3 Edward H. Marable, 7 Ann E. Lamb, 14 William S. Graves, 12 Joseph T. Brown, 4 Albert G. Brown, 9 Letitia A. Brown, 4 Robert J. Vaiden, 25 Susan Gregory, 8 Sarah E. Townley, 4 James H. Lipscomb, 3 B. E. Graves, 5 Morris F. Vaiden, 7 James H. Christian, 29 James H. Pierce (in trust), 13 Jerome M. Vaiden, 2 Elizabeth T. Vaiden, 11 Edmund A Sanders, 1 Marieva Sanders, 1 Marietta Sanders, 1 Essy Walker, 4 Robert W. Graves, 4 William F. Graves, 3 Thomas S. Christian, 2 Thomas Bowry, 14 Richard M. Graves, 16 John S. Vaiden, 7 Susan Barrow, 2 Henry B. Hopkins, 22 Henry P. Barrow, 12 Mildred Lacy, 2 Alfred Finch, 5 John Smith, 22 Sarah E. Coleman, 18 Thomas P. Harrison, 10 C. A. M. Harrison, 13 Nanny B. Harrison, 12 Josiah C. Wilson, 60 Charles J. Major, 2 Mary M. Major, 1 Joseph L. New, 6 B. P. Binns, 15 Ann K. C. Otey, 15 Bettie J. Lipscomb, 1 John M. Lamb, 18 Henry M. Clay, 2 James Hubbard, 4 Frances A. Ware, 3 Samuel Waddell, 17 Joyce Binns, 1 William Jordon, 89 Mary A. C. Walker, 23 Sam Brown, 1 L. W. Vaiden, 11 A. M. Ferguson, 28 E. A. Adams, 2 John M. Ferguson, 1 William H. Clopaton (?), 25 John Tyler, 44 George Major, 27 Elizabeth Marable, 1 Anderson Wade, 10 Thomas H. Wilcox, 31 Thomas W. Wilcox, 15 F. L. Douthat, 29 Robert Douthat, 47 Eleanor Douthat, 11 P. F. Gary, 15 William H. Seldon, 44 E. M. Gordon, 5 Tabitha Christian, 14 Edmund Waddell, 3 Richard Christian, 9 George Walker, 10 William H. Taylor, 15 Wm. H. Taylor, 2 Isaac H. Christian, 3 Selden C. Slater, 1 Franklin Gary, 6	Vernon J. M. Castle, 1 Thomas Christian, 39 Philip Haxall, 7 Goerge G. Bowry, 2 Lucy Kezee, 6 Thomas Stagg, 6 Mary A. Mumford, 3 Thomas W. Bradley, 41 Robert T. Epps, 10 B. A. Nance, 16 L. A. Marston, 7 Martha Butler, 13 William A. Marston, 9 Thomas H. Marston, 14 Susan A. Epps, 6 Robert Maddox, 2 Edwin L. Ware, 9 Christopher Maddox, 10 John H. Bowry, 11 Marion Gary, 1 Mary A. Gary, 7 William Otey, 5 R S. C. Robbins, 2 James Lawrence, 8 Nat Lawrence, 8 William A. Pearman, 6 Mary A. Bradly, 1 William Pemberton, 11 Rubin Moss, 3 William M. Warinner, 6 William Warinner, 3 Philip C. Buffet, 2 John M. Barlow, 1 John Rock 3 Priscilla Fauqua, 2 James B. Wayanack, 5 William Waddell, 1 John L. Walker, 10 Lucy Barnes, 7 A. Barnes, 1 James Nance, 2 Patric Pearman, 10 James A. Ladd, 8 Sam Hampton, 1 Isiah Bradly, 1 Allen Bradly, 23 Robert Bradly, 2 Patsy & Rebecca Pierce, 1 Ed James ward R. Phillips, 17 Joseph Gentry, 5 Daniel J. Adams, 7 Alexander A. Bugleston, 43 (agent for Edmund Ruffin) William E. Christian, 17 Conellum C.Folkes, 8 R. W. Christian, 7 Phillip Christian, 4 Mary Christian, 1 Elizabeth Christian, 5 William H. Hayes, 5 Richard Hayes, 5 Rebecca Hayes, 2 John A. Clark, 2 Archer Taylor, 20 Augustus T. Crenshaw, 22 Gideon Christian, 1 Martha A. Taylor, 9 William E. Gill, 14 Matthew Gentry, 5 Benn Ladd, 1 William H. Pearman, 1 Feeling W. Binnsaft, 1 G. A. Crenshaw, 11 John D. Clark, 10 William H. T. clark, 1 David Haxall, 36 William H. Alexander, 2 John P. Royal, 36 Hill Carter, 142 W. L. Crawford, 42 (agent for Rich Epps) William L, Shaw, 29 (agent for William M.Harrison) William Taylor, 2 Del Clark, 1 Miles K. Crenshaw, 13 H. P. Barrow, 1 Richard Folkes, 1 James E. Roane, 31 Powhatan B. Stark, 10 P.B. Stark, 19 Mary M. Orgain, 9 Mary Minge, 6 William A. Harrison, 45 William White, 3 (agent for William Bishop) Edward Major, 2 George E. Waddell, 16 John A. Selden, 25 Edward Wilcox, 75 William J. Upshaw, 29 Martha A. Taylor, 9 William E. Gill, 14 Matthew Gentry, 5 Benn Ladd, 1 William H. Pearman, 1 Feeling W. Binnsaft, 1 G. A. Crenshaw, 11 John D. Clark, 10	John J. Clark, 16 John R. Armistead, 45 John Selden, 53 James M. Wilcox, 82 Edward L. Young, 24 M. P. Barker, 9 employeed. by J. Parker, 6 (owners, William Marable, C. Harrison, E. B. Anderson, Mary Mumford, Elizabeth Warren) Theodrick Lipscomb, 182 (agent for Richard Baylor) Ben Harrison, 32 employeed. by Ben Harrison, 3 (H. D. Gordon, owner) Archer Harrison, 6 John T. Holt, 9 William R. Stagg, 14 Gideon Christian, 13 (Mary Christian, owned 4, B. L. Christian owned 7) Thomas F. Pollard, 9 employeed. by Thomas F. Pollard, 4 (Alfred Finch, owned 2, B. L. Christian owned 1, L. Royston owned 1) William A. Winston, 3 James H. Crump, 3 Sam Hampton, 1 Isiah Bradly, 1 Allen Bradly, 23 Robert Bradly, 2 Patsy & Rebecca Pierce, 1 Ed James ward R. Phillips, 17 Joseph Gentry, 5 Daniel J. Adams, 7 Alexander A. Bugleston, 43 (agent for Edmund Ruffin) William E. Christian, 17 Conellum C.Folkes, 8 R. W. Christian, 7 Phillip Christian, 4 Mary Christian, 1 Elizabeth Christian, 5 William H. Hayes, 5 Richard Hayes, 5 Rebecca Hayes, 2 John A. Clark, 2 Archer Taylor, 20 Augustus T. Crenshaw, 22 Gideon Christian, 1 David Haxall, 36 William H. Alexander, 2 John P. Royal, 36 Hill Carter, 142 W. L. Crawford, 42

10. Slavery In Early America's Colonies: Seeds of Servitude Rooted in The Civil Law of Rome

by Charles P.M. Outwin (1996)

The question of definable humanity in the slave continued to plagued the courts. Though his Negroes were impersonally "salable," an owner was not allowed arbitrarily to kill one "as he could an ox." Indeed, in 1706 it was determined that "the common law takes no notice of negroes (sic) for being different from other men. By common law no man can have property in another, except in special instances ....” The opinion handed down by Sir Philip Yorke, Attorney-General of the realm at the end of 1729, stated that

a slave, by coming from the West Indies, either with or without his master, to Great Britain or Ireland, doth not become free; and that his master's property or right in him is not thereby determined or varied; and baptism doth not bestow freedom on him, nor make any alteration in his temporal condition in these kingdoms.This was an unfortunate decision, because by then American and British legal practice had already begun to diverge along the lines of economic expediency, supported by resort to Roman civil code. American courts in the South were to look more and more to Roman law concerning propertied interest for antecedents. The common law, then, had become victim of its own flexibility.

13. “The Universal Law of Slavery," by George Fitzhugh (most important advocate of slavery)   1857
He the Negro is but a grown up child, and must be governed as a child, not as a lunatic or criminal. The master occupies toward him the place of parent or guardian. We shall not dwell on this view, for no one will differ with us who thinks as we do of the negro's capacity, and we might argue till dooms-day in vain, with those who have a high opinion of the negro's moral and intellectual capacity.
Secondly. The negro is improvident; will not lay up in summer for the wants of winter; will not accumulate in youth for the exigencies of age. He would become an insufferable burden to society. Society has the right to prevent this, and can only do so by subjecting him to domestic slavery. In the last place, the negro race is inferior to the white race, and living in their midst, they would be far outstripped or outwitted in the chaos of free competition. Gradual but certain extermination would be their fate. We presume the maddest abolitionist does not think the negro's providence of habits and money-making capacity at all to compare to those of the whites. This defect of character would alone justify enslaving him, if he is to remain here. In Africa or the West Indies, he would become idolatrous, savage and cannibal, or be devoured by savages and cannibals. At the North he would freeze or starve.
We would remind those who deprecate and sympathize with negro slavery, that his slavery here relieves him from a far more cruel slavery in Africa, or from idolatry and cannibalism, and every brutal vice and crime that can disgrace humanity; and that it christianizes, protects, supports and civilizes him; that it governs him far better than free laborers at the North are governed. There, wife-murder has become a mere holiday pastime; and where so many wives are murdered, almost all must be brutally treated. Nay, more; men who kill their wives or treat them brutally, must be ready for all kinds of crime, and the calendar of crime at the North proves the inference to be correct. Negroes never kill their wives. If it be objected that legally they have no wives, then we reply, that in an experience of more than forty years, we never yet heard of a negro man killing a negro woman. Our negroes are not only better off as to physical comfort than free laborers, but their moral condition is better.
The negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and, in some sense, the freest people in the world. The children and the aged and infirm work not at all, and yet have all the comforts and necessaries of life provided for them. They enjoy liberty, because they are oppressed neither by care nor labor. The women do little hard work, and are protected from the despotism of their husbands by their masters. The negro men and stout boys work, on the average, in good weather, not more than nine hours a day. The balance of their time is spent in perfect abandon. Besides' they have their Sabbaths and holidays. White men, with so much of license and liberty, would die of ennui; but negroes luxuriate in corporeal and mental repose. With their faces upturned to the sun, they can sleep at any hour; and quiet sleep is the greatest of human enjoyments. "Blessed be the man who invented sleep." 'Tis happiness in itself--and results from contentment with the present, and confident assurance of the future.
A common charge preferred against slavery is, that it induces idleness with the masters. The trouble, care and labor, of providing for wife, children and slaves, and of properly governing and administering the whole affairs of the farm, is usually borne on small estates by the master. On larger ones, he is aided by an overseer or manager. If they do their duty, their time is fully occupied. If they do not, the estate goes to ruin. The mistress, on Southern farms, is usually more busily, usefully and benevolently occupied than any one on the farm. She unites in her person, the offices of wife, mother, mistress, housekeeper, and sister of charity. And she fulfills all these offices admirably well. The rich men, in free society, may, if they please, lounge about town, visit clubs, attend the theatre, and have no other trouble than that of collecting rents, interest and dividends of stock. In a well constituted slave society, there should be no idlers. But we cannot divine how the capitalists in free society are to put to work. The master labors for the slave, they exchange industrial value. But the capitalist, living on his income, gives nothing to his subjects. He lives by mere exploitations.

The Black American A Documentary History, Third Edition, by Leslie H. Fishel, Jr. and Benjamin Quarles, Scott, Foresman and Company, Illinois, 1976,1970

14. Theodore Dwight Weld, 1839, Slavery as it Really Is

Reader, you are empaneled as a juror to try a plain case and bring in an honest verdict. The question at issue is not one of law, but of fact--"What is the actual condition of the slaves in the United States?" A plainer case never went to a jury. Look at it. Twenty seven hundred thousand persons in this country, men, women, and children, are in slavery. Is slavery, as a condition for human beings, good, bad, or indifferent?...

Two millions seven hundred thousand persons in these States are in this condition. They are made slaves and are held such by force, and by being put in fear, and this for no crime!...

As slaveholders and their apologists are...flooding the world with testimony that their slaves are kindly treated; that they are well fed, well clothed, well housed, well lodged, moderately worked, and bountifully provided with all things needful for their comfort, we propose--first, to disprove their assertions by the testimony of a multitude of impartial witnesses, and then to put slaveholders themselves through a course of cross-questioning which shall draw their condemnation out of their own mouths. We will prove that the slaves in the United States are treated with barbarous inhumanity; that they are overworked, underfed, wretchedly clad and lodged, and have insufficient sleep; that they are often made to wear round their necks iron collars armed with prongs, to drag heavy chains and weights at their feet while working in the field, and to wear yokes, and bells, and iron horns; that they are often kept confined in the stocks day and night for weeks together, made to wear gags in their mouths for hours or days, have some of their front teeth torn out or broken off, that they may be easily detected when they run away; that they are frequently flogged with terrible severity, have red pepper rubbed into their lacerated flesh, and hot brine, spirits of turpentine, &c., poured over the gashes to increase the torture; that they are often stripped naked, their backs and limbs cut with knives, bruised and mangled by scores and hundreds of blows with the paddle, and terribly torn by the claws of cats, drawn over them by their tormenters; that they are often hunted with blood hounds and shot down like beasts, or torn in pieces by dogs; that they are often suspended by the arms and whipped and beaten till they faint, and when revived by restoratives, beaten again till they faint, and sometimes till they die; that their ears are often cut off, their eyes knocked out, their bones broken, their flesh branded with red hot irons; that they are maimed, mutilated, and burned to death over slow fires.... We will establish all these facts by the testimony of scores and hundreds of eye witnesses, by the testimony of slaveholders in all parts of the slave states, by slaveholding members of Congress and of state legislatures, by ambassadors to foreign courts, by judges, by doctors of divinity, and clergy men of all denominations, by merchants, mechanics, lawyers and physicians, by presidents and professors in colleges and professional seminaries, by planters, overseers and drivers.

15. David Walker's Appeal

My dearly beloved Brethren and Fellow Citizens.



Having travelled over a considerable portion of these United States, and having, in the course of my travels, taken the most accurate observations of things as they exist -- the result of my observations has warranted the full and unshaken conviction, that we, (coloured people of these United States,) are the most degraded, wretched, and abject set of beings that ever lived since the world began; and I pray God that none like us ever may live again until time shall be no more. They tell us of the Israelites in Egypt, the Helots in Sparta, and of the Roman Slaves, which last were made up from almost every nation under heaven, whose sufferings under those ancient and heathen nations, were, in comparison with ours, under this enlightened and Christian nation, no more than a cypher -- or, in other words, those heathen nations of antiquity, had but little more among them than the name and form of slavery; while wretchedness and endless miseries were reserved, apparently in a phial, to be poured out upon, our fathers ourselves and our children, by Christian Americans! 
... I call upon the professing Christians, I call upon the philanthropist, I call upon the very tyrant himself, to show me a page of history, either sacred or profane, on which a verse can be found, which maintains, that the Egyptians heaped the insupportable insult upon the children of Israel, by telling them that they were not of the human family. Can the whites deny this charge? Have they not, after having reduced us to the deplorable condition of slaves under their feet, held us up as descending originally from the tribes of Monkeys or Orang-Outangs? O! my God! I appeal to every man of feeling-is not this insupportable? Is it not heaping the most gross insult upon our miseries, because they have got us under their feet and we cannot help ourselves? Oh! pity us we pray thee, Lord Jesus, Master. -- Has Mr. Jefferson declared to the world, that we are inferior to the whites, both in the endowments of our bodies and our minds? It is indeed surprising, that a man of such great learning, combined with such excellent natural parts, should speak so of a set of men in chains. I do not know what to compare it to, unless, like putting one wild deer in an iron cage, where it will be secured, and hold another by the side of the same, then let it go, and expect the one in the cage to run as fast as the one at liberty. So far, my brethren, were the Egyptians from heaping these insults upon their slaves, that Pharaoh's daughter took Moses, a son of Israel for her own, as will appear by the following. 
The world knows, that slavery as it existed was, mans, (which was the primary cause of their destruction) was, comparatively speaking, no more than a cypher, when compared with ours under the Americans. Indeed I should not have noticed the Roman slaves, had not the very learned and penetrating Mr. Jefferson said, "when a master was murdered, all his slaves in the same house, or within hearing, were condemned to death." -- Here let me ask Mr. Jefferson, (but he is gone to answer at the bar of God, for the deeds done in his body while living,) I therefore ask the whole American people, had I not rather die, or be put to death, than to be a slave to any tyrant, who takes not only my own, but my wife and children's lives by the inches? Yea, would I meet death with avidity far! far!! in preference to such servile submission to the murderous hands of tyrants. Mr. Jefferson's very severe remarks on us have been so extensively argued upon by men whose attainments in literature, I shall never be able to reach, that I would not have meddled with it, were it not to solicit each of my brethren, who has the spirit of a man, to buy a copy of Mr. Jefferson's "Notes on Virginia," and put it in the hand of his son. 




But let us review Mr. Jefferson's remarks respecting us some further. Comparing our miserable fathers, with the learned philosophers of Greece, he says: "Yet notwithstanding these and other discouraging circumstances among the Romans, their slaves were often their rarest artists. They excelled too, in science, insomuch as to be usually employed as tutors to their master's children; Epictetus, Terence and Phaedrus, were slaves, -- but they were of the race of whites. It is not their condition then, but nature, which has produced the distinction." See this, my brethren! ! Do you believe that this assertion is swallowed by millions of the whites? Do you know that Mr. Jefferson was one of as great characters as ever lived among the whites? See his writings for the world, and public labours for the United States of America. Do you believe that the assertions of such a man, will pass away into oblivion unobserved by this people and the world? If you do you are much mistaken-See how the American people treat us -- have we souls in our bodies? Are we men who

(15 CONTINUED)have any spirits at all? I know that there are many swell-bellied fellows among us, whose greatest object is to fill their stomachs. Such I do not mean -- I am after those who know and feel, that we are MEN, as well as other people; to them, I say, that unless we try to refute Mr. Jefferson's arguments respecting us, we will only establish them. 


Are we MEN! ! -- I ask you, 0 my brethren I are we MEN? Did our Creator make us to be slaves to dust and ashes like ourselves? Are they not dying worms as well as we? Have they not to make their appearance before the tribunal of Heaven, to answer for the deeds done in the body, as well as we? Have we any other Master but Jesus Christ alone? Is he not their Master as well as ours? -- What right then, have we to obey and call any other Master, but Himself? How we could be so submissive to a gang of men, whom we cannot tell whether they are as good as ourselves or not, I never could conceive. However, this is shut up with the Lord, and we cannot precisely tell -- but I declare, we judge men by their works. The whites have always been an unjust, jealous, unmerciful, avaricious and blood-thirsty set of beings, always seeking after power and authority. 
...to my no ordinary astonishment, [a] Reverend gentleman got up and told us (coloured people) that slaves must be obedient to their masters -- must do their duty to their masters or be whipped -- the whip was made for the backs of fools, &c. Here I pause for a moment, to give the world time to consider what was my surprise, to hear such preaching from a minister of my Master, whose very gospel is that of peace and not of blood and whips, as this pretended preacher tried to make us believe. What the American preachers can think of us, I aver this day before my God, I have never been able to define. They have newspapers and monthly periodicals, which they receive in continual succession, but on the pages of which, you will scarcely ever find a paragraph respecting slavery, which is ten thousand times more injurious to this country than all the other evils put together; and which will be the final overthrow of its government, unless something is very speedily done; for their cup is nearly full.-Perhaps they will laugh at or make light of this; but I tell you Americans! that unless you speedily alter your course, you and your Country are gone! ! ! ! ! 
Let no man of us budge one step, and let slave-holders come to beat us from our country. America is more our country, than it is the whites-we have enriched it with our blood and tears. The greatest riches in all America have arisen from our blood and tears: -- and will they drive us from our property and homes, which we have earned with our blood? They must look sharp or this very thing will bring swift destruction upon them. The Americans have got so fat on our blood and groans, that they have almost forgotten the God of armies. But let the go on. 
Surely, the Americans must think that we are brutes, as some of them have represented us to be. They think that we do not feel for our brethren, whom they are murdering by the inches, but they are dreadfully deceived. 
I declare to you, while you keep us and our children in bondage, and treat us like brutes, to make us support you and your families, we cannot be your friends. You do not look for it do you? Treat us then like men, and we will be your friends. And there is not a doubt in my mind, but that the whole of the past will be sunk into oblivion, and we yet, under God, will become a united and happy people. The whites may say it is impossible, but remember that nothing is impossible with God. 
 You want slaves, and want us for your slaves ! ! ! My colour will yet, root some of you out of the very face of the earth ! ! ! ! ! ! You may doubt it if you please. I know that thousands will doubt-they think they have us so well secured in wretchedness, to them and their children, that it is impossible for such things to occur. 


See your Declaration Americans! ! ! Do you understand your won language? Hear your languages, proclaimed to the world, July 4th, 1776 -- "We hold these truths to be self evident -- that ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL! ! that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness! !" Compare your own language above, extracted from your Declaration of Independence, with your cruelties and murders inflicted by your cruel and unmerciful fathers and yourselves on our fathers and on us -- men who have never given your fathers or you the least provocation! ! ! ! ! !

16.

17.  Lewis Clarke

Lewis Clarke, the son of a Scottish weaver and a slave mother, was born in Kentucky in 1815. Despite an agreement that she was to be freed upon her husband's death, Clarke's mother and her nine children remained in slavery. After he learned that he was going to be sold in New Orleans, Clarke successfully fled through Ohio across Lake Erie to Canada in 1841. In an account of his life published in 1846, he provided answers to questions he was frequently asked about the impact of slavery upon slave families.

[Question] Are families often separated? How many such cases have you personally known?

[Answer] I never knew a whole family to live together till all were grown up in my life. There is almost always, in every family, some one or more keen and bright, or else sullen and stubborn slave, whose influence they are afraid of on the rest of the family, and such a one must take a walking ticket to the south. 
There are other causes of separation. The death of a large owner is the occasion usually of many families being broken up. Bankruptcy is another cause of separation, and the hard-heartedness of a majority of slave-holders another and a more fruitful cause than either or all the rest. Generally there is but little more scruple about separating families than there is with a man who keeps sheep in selling off the lambs in the fall. On one plantation where I lived, there was an old slave named Paris. He was from fifty to sixty years old, and a very honest and apparently pious slave. A slave-trader came along one day, to gather hands for the south. The old master ordered the waiter or coachman to take Paris into the back room pluck out all his gray hairs, rub his face with a greasy towel, and then had him brought forward and sold for a young man. His wife consented to go with him, upon a promise from the trader that they should be sold together, with their youngest child, which she carried in her arms. They left two behind them, who were only from four to six or eight years of age. The speculator collected his drove, started for the market, and, before he left the state, he sold that infant child to pay one of his tavern bills, and took the balance in cash....

[Question] Have you ever known a slave mother to kill her own children?

[Answer] There was a slave mother near where I lived, who took her child into the cellar and killed it. She did it to prevent being separated from her child. Another slave mother took her three children and threw them into a well, and then jumped in with them, and they were all drowned. Other instances I have frequently heard of. At the death of many and many a slave child, I have seen the two feelings struggling in the bosom of a mother -- joy, that it was beyond the reach of the slave monsters, and the natural grief of a mother over her child. In the presence of the master, grief seems to predominate; when away from them, they rejoice that there is one whom the slave-killer will never torment.

Source: Interesting Memoirs and Documents Relating to American Slavery, and the Glorious 
Struggle Now Making for Complete Emancipation (London, 1846)

18.  Thomas James

Thomas James was an African-American minister sent by the American Missionary Society to care for the families of black Union soldiers in Louisville. He gave this stirring account of the conditions for slaves and freedmen in Louisville during the Civil War.

I returned to Rochester in 1856, and took charge of the colored church in this city. In 1862 I received an appointment from the American Missionary Society to labor among the colored people of Tennessee and Louisiana, but I never reached either of these states. I left Rochester with my daughter, and reported at St. Louis, where I received orders to proceed to Louisville, Kentucky. On the train, between St. Louis and Louisville, a party of forty Missouri ruffians entered the car at an intermediate station, and threatened to throw me and my daughter off the train. They robbed me of my watch. The conductor undertook to protect us, but, finding it out of his power, brought a number of Government officers and passengers from the next car to our assistance. At Louisville the government took me out of the hands of the Missionary Society to take charge of freed and refugee blacks, to visit the prisons of that commonwealth, and to set free all colored persons found confined without charge of crime. I served first under the orders of General Burbage, and then under those of his successor, General Palmer. The homeless colored people, for whom I was to care, were gathered in a camp covering ten acres of ground on the outskirts of the city. They were housed in light buildings, and supplied with rations from the commissary stores. Nearly all the persons in the camp were women and children, for the colored men were sworn into the United States service as soldiers as fast as they came in.

My first duty, after arranging the affairs of the camp, was to visit the slave pens, of which there were five in the city. The largest, known as Garrison's, was located on Market Street, and to that I made my first visit. When I entered it, and was about to make a thorough inspection of it, Garrison stopped me with the insolent remark, "I guess no nigger will go over me in this pen." I showed him my orders, whereupon he asked time to consult the mayor. He started for the entrance, but was stopped by the guard I had stationed there. I told him he would not leave the pen until I had gone through every part of it. "So," said I, "throw open your doors, or I will put you under arrest." I found hidden away in that pen 260 colored persons, part of them in irons. I took them all to my camp, and they were free. I next called at Otterman's pen on Second Street, from which also I took a large number of slaves. A third large pen was named Clark's, and there were two smaller ones besides. I liberated the slaves in all of them. One morning it was reported to me that a slave trader had nine colored men locked in a room in the National hotel. A waiter from the hotel brought the information at daybreak. I took a squad of soldiers with me to the place, and demanded the surrender of the blacks. The clerk said there were none in the house. Their owners had gone off with "the boys" at daybreak. I answered that I could take no man's word in such a case, but must see for myself. When I was about to begin the search, a colored man secretly gave me the number of the room the men were in. The room was locked, and the porter refused to give up the keys. A threat to place him under arrest brought him to reason, and I found the colored men inside, as I had anticipated.

One of them, an old man, who sat with his face between his hands, said as I entered: "So'thin' tole me last night that so'thin' was a goin' to happen to me." That very day I mustered the nine men into the service of the government, and that made them free men.

So much anger was excited by these proceedings, that the mayor and common council of Louisville visited General Burbage at his headquarters, and warned him that if I was not sent away within forty-eight hours my life would pay the forfeit. The General sternly answered them: "If James is killed, I will hold responsible for the act every man who fills an office under your city government. I will hang them all higher than Haman was hung, and I have 15,000 troops behind me to carry out the order. Your only salvation lies in protecting this colored man's life."

During my first year and a half at Louisville, a guard was stationed at the door of my room every night, as a necessary precaution in view of the threats of violence of which I was the object. One night I received a suggestive hint of the treatment the rebel sympathizers had in store for me should I chance to fall into their hands. A party of them approached the house where I was lodged protected by a guard. The soldiers, who were new recruits, ran off in afright. I found escape by the street cut off, and as I ran for the rear alley I discovered that avenue also guarded by a squad of my enemies. As a last resort I jumped a side fence, and stole along until out of sight and hearing of the enemy. Making my way to the house of a colored man named White, I exchanged my uniform for an old suit of his, and then, sallying forth, mingled with the rebel party, to learn, if possible, the nature of their intentions. Not finding me, and not having noticed my escape, they concluded that they must have been misinformed as to my lodging place for that night. Leaving the locality they proceeded to the house of another friend of mine, named Bridle, whose home was on Tenth Street. After vainly searching every room in Bridle's house, they dispersed with the threat that if they got me I should hang to the nearest lamp-post. For a long time after I was placed in charge of the camp, I was forced to forbid the display of lights in any of the buildings at night, for fear of drawing the fire of rebel bushwhackers. All the fugitives in the camp made their beds on the floor, to escape danger from rifle balls fired through the thin siding of the frame structures.

I established a Sunday and a day school in my camp and held religious services twice a week as well as on Sundays. I was ordered by General Palmer to marry every colored woman that came into camp to a soldier unless she objected to such a proceeding. The ceremony was a mere form to secure the freedom of the female colored refugees; for Congress had passed a law giving freedom to the wives and children of all colored soldiers and sailors in the service of the government. The emancipation proclamation, applying as it did only to states in rebellion, failed to meet the case of slaves in Kentucky, and we were obliged to resort to this ruse to escape the necessity of giving up to their masters many of the runaway slave women and children who flocked to our camp.

I had a contest of this kind with a slave trader known as Bill Hurd. He demanded the surrender of a colored woman in my camp who claimed her freedom on the plea that her husband had enlisted in the federal army. She wished to go to Cincinnati, and General Palmer, giving me a railway pass for her, cautioned me to see her on board the cars for the North before I left her. At the levee I saw Hurd and a policeman, and suspecting that they intended a rescue, I left the girl with the guard at the river and returned to the general for a detail of one or more men.

During my absence Hurd claimed the woman from the guard and the latter brought all the parties to the provost marshal's headquarters, although I had directed him to report to General Palmer with the woman in case of trouble; for I feared that the provost marshal's sympathies were on the slave owner's side. I met Hurd, the policeman and the woman at the corner of Sixth and Green streets and halted them. Hurd said the provost marshal had decided that she was his property. I answered -- what I had just learned that the provost marshal was not at his headquarters and that his subordinate had no authority to decide such a case. I said further that I had orders to take the party before General Palmer and proposed to do it. They saw it was not prudent to resist, as I had a guard to enforce the order.

When the parties were heard before the general, Hurd said the girl had obtained her freedom and a pass by false pretenses. She was his property; he had paid $500 for her; she was single when he bought her and she had not married since. Therefore she could claim no rights under the law giving freedom to the wives of colored soldiers. The general answered that the charge of false pretenses was a criminal one and the woman would be held for trial upon it. "But," said Hurd, "she is my property and I want her." "No," answered the general, "we keep our own prisoners." The general said to me privately, after Hurd was gone: "The woman has a husband in our service and I know it; but never mind that. We'll beat these rebels at their own game." Hurd hung about headquarters two or three days until General Palmer said finally: "I have no time to try this case; take it before the provost marshal." The latter, who had been given the hint, delayed action for several days more, and then turned over the case to General Dodge. After another delay, which still further tortured the slave trader, General Dodge said to me one day: "James, bring Mary to my headquarters, supply her with rations, have a guard ready, and call Hurd as a witness." When the slave trader had made his statement to the same effect as before, General Dodge delivered judgment in the following words: "Hurd, you are an honest man. It is a clear case. All I have to do, Mary, is to sentence you to keep away from this department during the remainder of the present war. James, take her across the river and see her on board the cars." "But, general," whined Hurd, "that won't do. I shall lose her services if you send her north." "You have nothing to do with it; you are only a witness in this case," answered the general. I carried out the order strictly, to remain with Mary until the cars started; and under the protection of a file of guards, she was soon placed on the train en route for Cincinnati.

Among the slaves I rescued and brought to the refugee camp was a girl named Laura, who had been locked up by her mistress in a cellar and left to remain there two days and as many nights without food or drink. Two refugee slave women were seen by their master making toward my camp, and calling upon a policeman he had then seized and taken to the house of his brother-in-law on Washington street. When the facts were reported to me, I took a squad of guards to the house and rescued them. As I came out of the house with the slave women, their master asked me: "What are you going to do with them?" I answered that they would probably take care of themselves. He protested that he had always used the runaway women well, and appealing to one of them, asked: "Have I not, Angelina?" I directed the woman to answer the question, saying that she had as good a right to speak as he had, and that I would protect her in that right. She then said: "He tied my dress over my head Sunday and whipped me for refusing to carry victuals to the bushwhackers and guerrillas in the woods." I brought the women to camp, and soon afterwards sent them north to find homes. I sent one girl rescued by me under somewhat similar circumstances as far as this city to find a home with Colonel Klinck's family.

Up to that time in my career I had never received serious injury at any man's hands. I was several times reviled and hustled by mobs in my first tour of the district about the city of Rochester, and once when I was lecturing in New Hampshire a reckless, half-drunken fellow in the lobby fired a pistol at me, the ball shattering the plaster a few feet from my head. But, as I said, I had never received serious injury. Now, however, I received a blow, the effects of which I shall carry to my grave. General Palmer sent me to the shop of a blacksmith who was suspected of bushwhacking, with an order requiring the latter to report at headquarters. The rebel, who was a powerful man, raised a short iron bar as I entered and aimed a savage blow at my head. By an instinctive movement I saved my life, but the blow fell on my neck and shoulders, and I was for a long time afterwards disabled by the injury. My right hand remains partially paralyzed and almost wholly useless to this day.

Many a sad scene I witnessed at my camp of colored refugees in Louisville. There was the mother bereaved of her children, who had been sold and sent farther South lest they should escape in the general rush for the federal lines and freedom; children, orphaned in fact if not in name, for separation from parents among the colored people in those days left no hope of reunion this side the grave; wives forever parted from their husbands, and husbands who might never hope to catch again the brightening eye and the welcoming smile of the help-mates whose hearts God and nature had joined to theirs. Such recollections come fresh to me when with trembling voice I sing the old familiar song of anti-slavery days:

Oh deep was the anguish of the slave mother's heart 
When called from her darling forever to part; 
So grieved that lone mother, that broken-hearted mother 
In sorrow and woe. 
The child was borne off to a far-distant clime 
While the mother was left in anguish to pine; 
But reason departed, and she sank broken-hearted 
In sorrow and woe.

I remained at Louisville a little over three years, staying for some months after the war closed in charge of the colored camp, the hospital, dispensary and government stores.

Wonderful Eventful Life of Rev. Thomas James, by himself 
Third Edition, Rochester, NY: Post-Express Printing Company, Mill Street. 1887.

19. George Browder

George Browder was a slave-holding minister in Logan County. This is his account of the day all his slaves ran away.

June 8, 1864

A day of strange feelings! Found my plantation entirely deserted by negroes - not one left! Abram, Bob, Jeff, George & Ellen, Dolly Underwood, William, Ida, Nicholas, & Lucy all gone! Took my wagon, old carriage, two horses & two mules. We felt lighter some how than usual, felt poorer, but freer, more dependent, yet more self-reliant. Lizzie got breakfast & I milked the cows. The children seemed gleeful & at the family prayer we earnestly involved Gods blessing guidance and good providence in our new circumstances. William & I with a number of others set out in search of our horses and wagons. Ten negroes left me -- 3 from father -- 8 from Nelson Waters -- six from McCulloch, 3 from John Vick & others in a different neighborhood. We met part of the troop arrested and brought back -- & had a vast deal of trouble and vexation in separated & deciding what to do with them. George & Ellen & all mine except Jeff and Abe escaped leaving their clothes & all their goods. We put the men under guard to send to Louisville & just as my wagon and carriage got in with the baggage, my brother William came with all the rest of the fugitives -- looking worn, sad and confounded. They had been overtaken in a few miles of Clarksville. We whipped Jeff & Bob & Lucy, & Ellen made herself sick -- quite sick -- in the long tramp through heat, mud & rain, after they left the wagons.

Poor unfortunate creatures, how I pity them, deceived & misled as they have been, yet listening to strangers rather than those who have raised & cared for them. They have been greatly abused in their minds. I should have been glad if they had gotten safe into Clarksville without my responsibility.

The Heavens Are Weeping: The Diaries of George R. Browder 
Edited by Richard R. Troutman 
Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Books. 1987.

20.  Jane Giles

Jane Giles was a slave belonging to Margaret Preston of Lexington. While on a trip to New York, Jane ran away. Later she wrote to her former mistress to explain why. Another letter tells us that life as a free African American during these times was not comfortable. These letters were not written during the Civil War, but six years before.

Jane Giles (New York) to Margaret Wickliffe Preston 
(Washington D.C.), February 8th 1854 
Mrs William Preston

Madam. I take this oppertunity to wright you these few lines to inform you that I am well at this time and I hope you are the same. Dear madam I sopose you wonder why that I left you. Well I will tell you the Reason one Reason was because you Parted me and my housbond as tho we had no feeling and the Next Reason was because you accused me of stealing Money and I was not gilty of it but because I am coulard You sopose that I have not got any feelings I have feelings thank god as well as you and I sopose you feel the Loss of me as much as I do the loss of you. I worked for you when I was with you and dear madam I am working for my Sealf and let me inform you that I Loved my housbond as well as you do yours if I never see him again in this world but I am in hopes to meet him in Haven

I sopose you will call this impedance But I do not I have nothing Against Mr. Preston he treated me well he would not have sent my husbound away had it not been for you and I would have been yet with you. But Never mind Every boddy must have trubble

I Remane Yours

Jane Giles (Box 49)

21. John Fee

John Fee was a minister who was sent to tend to the needs of the families of African-American soldiers who enlisted in the Union army at Camp Nelson.

There was another phase of the work at Camp Nelson, then of interest to me, and connected by principle and effect with the work at Berea. The enlistment of colored men at Camp Nelson was soon followed by the coming of their wives and children. These were at first driven out of the camp at the point of the bayonet. Thus sent back, they were exposed to the cruelty of their former masters. I saw indignation rising in the hearts and showing itself in the actions of the colored soldiers. I went to the officials and said to them, "This driving back of wives and children will breed mutiny in your camp unless you desist." The reply was, "What will you do? - will you leave the women and children with the soldiers? That will never do." I said, "No; I would draw a picket line and put the women in the west end of the camp, which is abundantly large and encircled by Kentucky river and cliffs four hundred feet high. Such a natural fortification, high, beautiful, and well-watered, was not anywhere else found in the State." "But," said the Quartermaster, "I can do nothing in the way of shelter without an order from the Secretary of War." I replied, "I know Secretary Chase personally. I will prepare a paper to be sent to his care." "Do so," said the Quartermaster, "and I will sign it." The paper was forwarded. Quickly an order came from Stanton, the Secretary of War, for the construction of buildings; and in a short time the Quartermaster had ninety-two cottages erected as homes for families, two larger buildings as hospitals for sick women and children, and other buildings as school-rooms and offices, boarding hall, and dormitory for teachers, steward and family.

From Autobiography of John Fee

22. Charleston Mercury, Oct. 11, 1860

The Terrors of Submission

A few days since, we endeavored to show, that the pictures of ruin and desolation to the South, which the submissionists to Black Republican domination were so continually drawing, to "fright us from our propriety," were unreal and false. We propose now to reverse the picture, and to show what will probably be the consequences of a submission of the Southern States, to the rule of Abolitionism at Washington, in the persons of Messrs. LINCOLN and HAMLIN, should they be elected to the Presidency and Vice-Presidency of the United States.

1. The first effect of the submission of the South, to the installation of Abolitionists in the offices of President and Vice-President of the United States, must be a powerful consolidation of the strength of the Abolition party at the North. Success, generally strengthens. If, after all the threats of resistance and disunion, made in Congress and out of Congress, the Southern States sink down into acquiescence, the demoralization of the South will be complete. Add the patronage resulting from the control of ninety-four thousand offices, and the expenditure of eighty millions of money annually, and they must be irresistable in controlling the General Government.

2. To plunder the South for the benefit of the North, by a new Protective Tariff, will be one of their first measures of Northern sectional domination; and, on the other hand, to exhaust the treasury by sectional schemes of appropriation, will be a congenial policy.

3. Immediate danger will be brought to slavery, in all the Frontier States. When a party is enthroned at Washington, in the Executive and Legislative departments of the Government, whose creed it is, to repeal the Fugitive Slave Laws, the underground railroad, will become an over-ground railroad. The tenure of slave property will be felt to be weakened; and the slaves will be sent down to the Cotton States for sale, and the Frontier States enter on the policy of making themselves Free States.

4. With the control of the Government of the United States, and an organized and triumphant North to sustain them, the Abolitionists will renew their operations upon the South with increased courage. The thousands in every country who look up to power, and make gain out of the future, will come out in support of the Abolition Government. The BROWNLOWS and the BOTTS', in the South, will multiply. They will organize; and from being a Union party, to support an Abolition Government, they will become, like the Government they support, Abolitionists. They will have an Abolition Party in the South, of Southern men. The contest for slavery, will no longer be one between the North and the South. It will be in the South, between the people of the South.

5. If, in our present position of power and unitedness, we have the raid of JOHN BROWN -- and twenty towns burned down in Texas in one year, by Abolitionists -- what will be the measures of insurrection and incendiarism, which must follow our notorious and abject prostration to Abolition rule at Washington, with all the patronage of the Federal Government, and a Union organization in the South to support it? Secret conspiracy, and its attendant horrors, with rumors of horrors, will hover over every portion of the South; while, in the language of the Black Republican patriarch -- GIDDINGS -- they "will laugh at your calamities, and mock when your fear cometh."

6. Already there is uneasiness throughout the South, as to the stability of its institution of slavery. But with a submission to the rule of Abolitionists at Washington, thousands of slaveholders will despair of the institution. While the condition of things in the Frontier States will force their slaves on the markets of the Cotton States, the timid in the Cotton States, will also sell their slaves. The consequence must be, slave property must be greatly depreciated. We see advertisements for the sale of slaves in some of the Cotton States, for the simple object of getting rid of them; and we know that standing orders for the purchase of slaves in this market have been withdrawn, on account of an anticipated decline of value from the political condition of the country.

7. We suppose, that taking in view all these things, it is not extravagant to estimate, that the submission of the South to the administration of the Federal Government under Messrs. LINCOLN and HAMLIN, must reduce the value of slaves in the South, one hundred dollars each. It is computed that there are four million, three hundred thousand, slaves in the United States. Here, therefore, is a loss to the Southern people of four hundred and thirty millions of dollars, on their slaves alone. Of course, real estate of all kinds must partake also in the depreciation of slaves.

8. Slave property, is the foundation of all property in the South. When security in this is shaken, all other property partakes of its instability. Banks, stocks, bonds, must be influenced. Timid men will sell out and leave the South. Confusion, distrust and pressure must reign.

9. Before Messrs. LINCOLN and HAMLIN can be installed in Washington, as President and Vice-President of the United States, the Southern States can dissolve peaceably (we know what we say) their union with the North. Mr. LINCOLN and his Abolition cohorts, will have no South, to reign over. Their game would be blocked. The foundation of their organization, would be taken away; and, left to the tender mercies of a baffled, furious and troubled North, they would be cursed and crushed, as the flagitious cause of the disasters around them. But if we submit, and do not dissolve our union with the North, we make the triumph of our Abolition enemies complete, and enable them to consolidate and wield the power of the North, for our destruction.

10. If the South once submits to the rule of Abolitionists by the General Government, there is, probably, an end of all peaceful separation of the Union. We can only escape the ruin they meditate for the South, by war. Armed with power of the General Government, and their organizations at the North, they will have no respect for our courage or energy, and they will use the sword for our subjection. If there is any man in the South who believes, that we must separate from the North, we appeal to his humanity, in case Mr. LINCOLN is elected, to dissolve our connection with the North, before the 4th of March next.

11. The ruin of the South, by the emancipation of her slaves, is not like the ruin of any other people. It is not a mere loss of liberty, like the Italians under the BOURBONS. It is not heavy taxation, which must still leave the means of living, or otherwise taxation defeats itself. But it is the loss of liberty, property, home, country -- everything that makes life worth living. And this loss, will probably take place under circumstances of suffering and horror, unsurpassed in the history of nations. We must preserve our liberties and institutions, under penalties greater than those which impend over any people in the world.

12. Lastly, we conclude this brief statement of the terrors of submission, by declaring, that in our opinion, they are ten-fold greater even than the supposed terrors of disunion.

23. Letter of S.F. Hale, Commissioner of Alabama, to Gov. Beriah Magoffin of Kentucky

Sent in December of 1860

Who can look upon such a picture without a shudder? What Southern man, be he slave-holder or non-slave-holder, can without indignation and horror contemplate the triumph of negro equality, and see his own sons and daughters, in the not distant future, associating with free negroes upon terms of political and social equality, and the white man stripped, by the Heaven-daring hand of fanaticism of that title to superiority over the black race which God himself has bestowed? In the Northern States, where free negroes are so few as to form no appreciable part of the community, in spite of all the legislation for their protection, they still remain a degraded caste, excluded by the ban of society from social association with all but the lowest and most degraded of the white race. But in the South, where in many places the African race largely predominates, and, as a consequence, the two races would be continually pressing together, amalgamation, or the extermination of the one or the other, would be inevitable. Can Southern men submit to such degradation and ruin? God forbid that they should.

 24. Which Slave Wrote His Way Out of Slavery?

By: Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Posted: November 26, 2012 at 12:02 AM

From the time when they first landed in Florida in the early 1500s, African Americans did their best to run away from the inhumane conditions of slavery. Over the course of slavery in the United States between 1513 and 1865, tens of thousands of people managed to escape, first south from the Carolinas and Georgia to the haven afforded by Spanish Florida before 1763, and later, north from the Southern colonies and states across the Mason-Dixon Line. More than a hundred of these "fugitive slaves," as they were called, even wrote or dictated books about their deliverance from bondage, detailing how they were able to escape. While each escape was something of a miracle, some of the methods that they used are astonishing.

Everyone has their favorite slave narratives, as the genre of books is called. My own short list includes the stories of Henry Brown, William and Ellen Craft and Frederick Douglass. In 1838 Frederick Douglass donned a sailor's uniform, sewn by his soon-to-be wife, who was free, and rode a train from Baltimore to Philadelphia disguised as a free man using papers he had obtained from a free black seaman. In 1848 Ellen Craft, who had a very light complexion, did a double cross-dress as white man and, accompanied by her dark-complexioned husband, rode to freedom on a train ride from Macon, Ga., to Philadelphia, masked as master and slave. A year later Henry "Box" Brown actually had himself nailed into a wooden, claustrophobic, coffin-like box, and then shipped from slavery in Richmond to freedom in Philadelphia.      

But the oddest way that a slave escaped from slavery, to me, without a doubt, is the story of Ayuba.

Ayuba wrote his way out of slavery. As incredible as this may seem, this is literally true. The man who came to be known in England as "Job ben Solomon" was born Ayuba Suleiman Jallo (or, in French, "Diallo") into a prominent family in Bundu, an independent, precolonial country located in current-day Senegal. Bundu was situated where the Falémé River meets the Senegal River, and it was a strictly Muslim country. 

Ayuba was a member of the Fulbe ethnic group. As his biographer Allen Austin tells us, Ayuba was a highly learned man, adept at both Koranic and Arabic studies. And, as the historian John Thornton explained to me, "he was a religious cleric who, like so many other Africans at the time, sold people as slaves, along with [selling] other things, as a way of participating in the international economy of his day, as an incidental element of his life." 

Some time in February 1730, he left his home on a two-week journey to purchase paper and other goods in exchange for two slaves. Mandingo slave traders captured and sold him to an English captain whom he had angered over the terms of sale of those two slaves. Ayuba survived the Middle Passage on board the slave ship Arabella (voyage 75094 in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Database) and ended up enslaved on a tobacco plantation on Kent Island, near Annapolis, Md.

Now renamed Simon by his master, Ayuba managed to run away, only to be recaptured and imprisoned. As luck would have it, he was visited by a lawyer named Thomas Bluett, who became fascinated by stories of this man's insistence on praying, refusing to eat pork or consume alcohol and most of all, by the habit of an African man writing on the wall of his prison cell in some unknown language. 

And then the strangest thing happened: Ayuba sat down one day, and -- hope against hope -- wrote a letter addressed to his father, back in Senegal. The letter was written entirely in Arabic. I have no idea what possessed this brother to do such a crazy thing, something completely impossible to achieve. After all, there wasn't exactly a postal service delivering letters from slaves back home to their relatives in the motherland, was there? But this is what this man did. And, incredibly, it worked!

Ayuba gave the letter, which implored his father to come to America and rescue him from slavery, to his master, Alexander Tolsey, who in turn gave it to Vachel Denton, who sent it by boat to Henry Hunt, an English merchant in London for whom Denton was a factor or agent. Hunt worked with a Captain Pyke, the man who had sold Ayuba into slavery in the first place. (It was a very small world!) Pyke in turn showed the letter to General James Oglethorpe, the founder of the colony of Georgia. Oglethorpe contacted his friend in the Royal African Company, Sir Bibye Lake, who had the bright idea of sending it to John Gagnier, a professor who held the Laudian Chair of Arabic at the University of Oxford, asking him to translate it. And what the letter revealed astonished them.

Amazed that an African was literate and well-educated, obviously so very intelligent and of noble lineage, Oglethorpe got the Royal African Company (which possessed a monopoly on the slave trade) to purchase Ayuba and ship him from Annapolis to London! Ayuba sailed for London with Thomas Bluett in March 1733. In London, the exotic Ayuba, dressed in his native garb, as we can see in his portrait by William Hoare, was the toast of the town. Called Job ben Solomon, he was befriended by a host of English notables, including the physician to the king, Sir Hans Sloane, the antiquarian Joseph Ames and the Duke of Montagu, who become one of his patrons, among many others. Ayuba had an audience with King George II and Queen Caroline, and was even made an honorary member of the Spalding Gentlemen's Society, in which Isaac Newton and Alexander Pope were members. 

These friends raised the funds to purchase his freedom from the Royal African Company, giving him the freedom to return home. At his request, Bluett wrote and published a memoir in 1734 detailing the strange circumstances of Ayuba's enslavement and freedom, including an explanation of the Anglicization of his name from the original Arabic "Hyuba, boon Salumena, boon Hibrahema," to Job, the Son of Solomon (ben Solomon), the Son of Abraham, the name Bluett used in his book. 

As the African-American food historian Michael Twitty told me, with only a hint of exaggeration and a dash of anachronism, "Job ben Solomon was essentially the first slave to FedEx himself back to Africa." (One is tempted to quote that sage philosopher of the people, Don King: "Only in America," but Thornton points out that a few examples of this can also be found in the history of slavery in Brazil.)

And in a final twist in a most ironic life, Ayuba did indeed return to Senegal, arriving on Aug. 8, 1734, the year in which his book was published, on board the Dolphin Snow, but now as an employee of the Royal African Company. He assisted the company in its bid to compete with the French commercial presence in Senegambia, including, presumably, the slave trade. One of the first things he did after he had landed was to trade some of the gifts his English patrons had given him to purchase two horses and, incredibly, a female slave.

Ayuba died in Gambia in 1773, the same year that the Boston slave Phillis Wheatley, who wrote fondly of "Pleasing Gambia" as her own native land, would become the first person of African descent to publish a volume of poetry in English.  

Like her metaphorical countryman, Wheatley would be freed by her master because of the power of her literary skills, some 40 years after Ayuba became the first African-American slave to write his way out of slavery.

25. Which Slave Mailed Himself to Freedom? Really!

By: Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Posted: May 6, 2013 at 12:36 AM

From the Collection of the New-York Historical Society

What is one of the most novel ways a slave devised to escape bondage?

Here you see a man by the name of Henry Brown,
Ran away from the South to the North,
Which he would not have done but they stole all his rights,
But they'll never do like again.
Chorus:  Brown laid down the shovel and the hoe,
Down in the box he did go; No more slave work for Henry Box Brown,
In the box by Express he did go.
--"Song Composed by Henry Box Brown on His Escape From Slavery," Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written by Himself 

Job ben Solomon, as we saw in an earlier column, was the first and probably the only slave who literally wrote his way out of American slavery. He penned a letter in Arabic to his father, from his jail cell in Maryland, which led quite circuitously to its translation at Oxford, England, and then to his purchase, release and repatriation to Senegambia in 1734 -- only after a stop in London where he was feted by British royalty and the intellectual elite, had his portrait painted and a book about his remarkable escapades published. 

But another slave plotted his own escape from bondage in even more astonishing and harrowing way, and his name was Henry Brown.

If Job ben Solomon expressed his desperate quest for freedom in a letter, Henry Brown expressed his own desperate desire to be free in an even more novel form: He actually mailed his own body from slavery to freedom, from Richmond to Philadelphia, from the slave state of Virginia to the free state of Pennsylvania, a distance of 250 miles.

Brown was the ultimate "escape artist," as Daphne Brooks brilliantly labels him in her book Bodies in Dissent. He was a precursor, she argues, to Houdini. And as we shall see, he not only performed his amazing -- and quite dangerous -- escape once, but reprised part of the journey during a lecture tour in England. But I get ahead of my story.

Henry Brown was born into slavery on a plantation called "The Hermitage" in Louisa County, Va., around 1815, fairly close to Charlottesville, where Thomas Jefferson was still living at Monticello. Upon his master's death, when Brown was 15, he was sent to work for his late owner's son, William, in his tobacco factory in Richmond. In about 1836, he married another slave (curiously, with their owners' consent), a woman named Nancy, who was owned by a bank clerk. Brown was able to rent a house for his family. Together, they had three children. 

Over time, Nancy was sold twice. Her third owner, Samuel Cottrell, actually charged Brown $50 a year to keep Nancy from being sold. But in August 1848, Cottrell sold Nancy anyway, along with their three children, to a Methodist minister in North Carolina. Brown raced to the jail where his family was being held, but it was too late. As they were shuffled through the streets of Richmond, Brown held Nancy's hand for four miles. Nancy and the three children were marched on foot along with 350 other slaves, in the horrendous second Middle Passage, all the way to North Carolina. Nancy was pregnant with their fourth child. The two would never see each other again.

  Brown tells us in his slave narrative that he begged his own master to purchase his family but his master refused: "I went to my Christian master … but he shoved me away." 

Devastated and overcome with the most acute sense of his own sheer powerlessness, Brown sought solace and guidance through prayer. "An idea," he reported, "suddenly flashed across my mind." And what an idea it was! Perhaps only God -- or an official at the expanding express delivery service in America -- could have fashioned such a bizarre plan: "Brown's revelation," Paul Finkelman and Richard Newman write in their entry on him in The African American National Biography, "was that he have himself nailed into a wooden box and 'conveyed as dry goods' via the Adams Express Company from slavery in Richmond to freedom in Philadelphia."

How was he to realize such a bold, and wild, idea? How would he avoid suffocation in this coffin-like encasement? What about claustrophobia? How long could a human being live in a box without dehydration? Not to mention deal with his body functions? As Brown's biographer, Jeffrey Ruggles, explains in The Unboxing of Henry Brown, Adams Express advertised the one-day trip from Richmond to Philadelphia, a distance of 250 miles -- but only if the package encountered no glitches, no delays. If so, the trip could take much longer. Could a human being survive such a trip? Or would his crate turn into his casket?

How He Did It 

Though only 5 feet, 8 inches tall, Brown at the time weighed 200 pounds, so this was not going to be an easy thing to accomplish, and impossible, of course, without a lot of assistance. Two friends, both named Smith, decided to help Henry with this crazy scheme: James Caesar Anthony Smith, a free black man who sang with Brown in the choir of First African Baptist Church, introduced Brown to Samuel Alexander Smith, a white shoemaker and gambler. Brown paid Samuel Smith $86 to help him.

Through James Smith's intervention, a black carpenter named John Mattaner built the wooden box -- "complete with baize lining, air holes, a container of water and hickory straps" -- to fit Brown's rotund frame. Samuel Smith corresponded with James Miller McKim, the Philadelphia abolitionist (and the father of future famed architect, Charles McKim) for guidance. McKim asked Smith to address the package to James Johnson, 131 Arch Street. 

As Henry Brown scholar Hollis Robbins writes in a 2009 American Studies article, "Smith's correspondence with McKim about the timing of the trip, particularly his attention to the breakup of the ice on the Susquehanna [River], indicates his -- and perhaps Brown's -- practical understanding of the conditions necessary for the box to arrive swiftly enough for Brown to survive the journey." The entire box measured only 3 feet 1 inch long, 2 feet wide and 2 feet 6 inches high. Brown burned his hand with sulphuric acid (oil of vitriol) so he could justify taking the day off without raising suspicion. He took along a few biscuits, or crackers, and a small bladder of water to sustain him.

With "This Side Up With Care" painted on the container, at 4:00 a.m. on March 23, 1849, Brown's friends loaded his boxed self onto a wagon, and delivered it to the depot. In his slave narrative, Brown describes his harrowing journey, including the sickening effect of traveling much of the journey upside-down, head-first, in spite of the label on the box. One wrong move, one unguarded sound or smell, would lead to his detection, capture, imprisonment and return to slavery, and perhaps to the Deep South.    

  Brown nearly died on the 27-hour trip: At one point, he was turned upside-down for several hours. His sole relief came when two passengers, wanting to talk, tipped the box flat to sit on it. The box was flipped again when it was boarded on a train in Washington, D.C. Brown had no choice but to remain silent and not move, no matter how the box was positioned.

Some 24 hours later, as Robbins describes, traveling by wagon to the depot, hefted by express workers from wagon to railcar, to steamboat, to another wagon, to another railcar, to a ferry and the once again by railcar, Brown finally arrived at the depot in Philadelphia. Three hours later, Brown's box was taken by wagon to the Anti-Slavery Committee's offices on North Fifth Street in Philadelphia. No one could know if their cargo was alive or dead. The four waiting abolitionists, including McKim, tapped on the lip of the crate four times, the signal that all was clear. 

Finkelman and Newman describe what happened next: "A small, nervous group, including William Still, the African-American conductor of Philadelphia's Underground Railroad, pried open the lid to reveal … the disheveled and battered Henry Brown, who arose and promptly fainted," but not before exclaiming, "How do you do, gentlemen!" Revived with a glass of water, Brown sang Psalm 40: "Be pleased, O Lord, to deliver me!" McKim noted that the trip "nearly killed him," and that "Nothing saved him from suffocation but the free use of water … with which he bathed his face, and the constant fanning of himself" with his hat. He managed to breathe through the three small holes that he bore in the box with a gimlet. Brown called his trip "my resurrection from the grave of slavery." 

Henceforth, the word "Box" would become Henry's self-chosen legal middle name, with no quotation marks around it. His friend, James Smith, however, did gain a nickname from the adventure: He became known as James "Boxer" Smith.

How His Fame Grew 

Henry Box Brown had done what no slave anywhere had ever done before: He had mailed himself to freedom. Overnight, Brown became quite the celebrity on the abolitionist lecture circuit, much to Frederick Douglass' annoyance. He and his friend James Smith became a standard feature at abolitionist rallies, reciting the incredible saga of his escape, singing songs he wrote, as well as his psalm of deliverance, and selling his book, which was published just a few months after his escape. Woodcuts of his head popping out of the wooden crate were widely circulated. Even a children's book contained a chapter about his incredible escape.

Brown was not only an effective speaker; you might say that he was also the entrepreneur of entrepreneurs on the fugitive-slave circuit. In an email, his biographer Jeffrey Ruggles said that "Brown's imagination and creativity were akin to his entrepreneurial contemporary," P.T. Barnum, though on a much smaller scale, of course. With a loan of $150 from the wealthy white abolitionist, Gerritt Smith, and in collaboration with the artist Josiah Wolcott, Brown created a "large, didactic panorama, 'The Mirror of Slavery,' which consisted of thousands of feet of canvas, divided into scores of panels painted with scenes depicting the history of slavery." 

Brown debuted his routine in Boston, along with James Smith. The panorama was a hit: As Christine Crater reports, "The Boston Daily Evening Traveller hailed it as 'one of the finest panoramas now on exhibition … Many people would walk a long way to see this curious specimen of American freedom … We wish all the slaveholders would go and view their system on canvas.' "

  Accompanied onstage by Benjamin F. Roberts, a black abolitionist, who would lecture on "The Condition of the Colored People in the United States," Brown toured the North testifying about the evils of slavery and repeating the details of his imaginative mode of escape. Brown -- a great storyteller with a gifted voice for song -- was for a short time the darling of the abolitionist circuit. 

Douglass' irritation with Brown stemmed not so much from a sense of rivalry (since Douglass had dominated the fugitive-slave category on the abolition lecture circuit since 1845) as it did from Douglass' worry that disclosure of Brown's novel method of escape might keep other slaves from employing a similar strategy, alerting authorities to the possibility that crates could contain a fleeing slave.

But as Ruggles explains, revelation of Brown's method of escape wasn't really his fault: "Douglass wasn't entirely correct in blaming the Garrisonians [abolitionists] for revealing the box method. They had tried to keep quiet about Brown's escape, but word leaked out in a Vermont newspaper and soon an article appeared in the New York Tribune. That article alerted the Adams Express Company and a second box escape from Richmond, attempted by both Smiths in May, 1849, was intercepted. It was only after articles about that failure had appeared in many newspapers that the Boston abolitionists went public about Brown's escape at the New England Anti-Slavery Convention in late May 1849."

Regardless of how it happened, Douglass proved to be right about the effects of disclosure: Upon discovery of the rescue attempt of a second slave on May 8, 1849, Samuel Smith, the white shopkeeper who had helped Brown, was arrested, and served six and a half years in the Virginia state penitentiary for doing so. A few months later, on Sept. 25, James Smith would also be arrested for an attempt to help still another slave to escape in the same way, though he would be acquitted in a trial, after which he joined Brown in Boston. (Another slave, a woman named Rose Jackson, was willingly smuggled by her owners from Oklahoma in a box over the Oregon Trail in the same year that Brown escaped, but she was allowed to emerge each night.)

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 put an end, for a time, to Brown's celebrity, at least on this side of the Atlantic. After being assaulted twice on the streets of Providence, R.I., Brown -- like many other prominent fugitive slaves -- fled to England in October 1850, to avoid arrest by a slave-catcher.

There, he published a second edition of his slave narrative in Manchester in 1851, this one "written by himself." (The first edition had been dictated to, and heavily edited by, a white abolitionist named Charles Stearns. John Ernest's edition, published in 2009, is the authoritative text.) Ever the showman, Brown soon became a most colorful feature on the British lecture circuit, traveling with his moving panorama from Liverpool to Manchester. He even re-enacted his escape, at least partially.

Jeffrey Ruggles writes that "Ads for Henry Box Brown stated that he would get into the original box as a part of his exhibition, but the only instance known of him actually being conveyed in his box was from Bradford to Leeds in May 1851." The Leeds Mercury reported that on May 22, 1851, as Ruggles discovered, " 'He was packed up in the box at Bradford' and 'forwarded to Leeds' on the 6 P.M. train. 'On arriving at the Wellington station, the box was placed in a coach and, preceded by a band of music and banners, representing the stars and stripes of America, paraded through the principal streets of the town.' " 

Ruggles explained that this didn't amount to a replication of Brown's original trip, however: "The distance was much less than Richmond to Philadelphia. For this event, Brown was in the box for two-and-three-quarter hours, and James Smith accompanied him outside the box the whole way, so it was neither as long nor as harrowing as his journey to escape. The box was taken to a theater where Brown emerged onstage."

How He Changed With the Times 

Brown was a complicated figure. There is some evidence that he could have purchased the freedom of his wife, Nancy, and their children, but chose not to. He married an Englishwoman and returned to the stage, performing for the remainder of the decade throughout Great Britain, in a traveling one-man version of Black History Month. The consummate multiplatform performer, Brown created a number of personas to match his skills as a narrator, singer, magician, hypnotist, electro-biologist and "boxing" champion, among them "The African Prince," "The King of All Mesmerizers" and "Professor H. Box Brown."

Finkelman and Newman report that Brown's British act featured "a large moving panorama to depict the history of black people in Africa and America, as he lectured on 'African and American Slavery.' He often appeared as an 'African Prince' as he melded antislavery sentiments and propaganda, popular history and entertaining theatrical production." Not one to miss a marketing opportunity, Brown took advantage of the raging Civil War, introducing to his act in 1862 "a new lecture and panorama called the 'Grand Moving Mirror of the American War.' " Near the end of the war, in 1864, Brown transformed himself once again, this time into a magician, billing himself as "Mr. H. Box Brown, the King of All Mesmerisers."

In 1875, at the age of 60, Brown returned to the United States, touring New England with his show, now called "The African Prince's Drawing-Room Entertainment." To the end, Brown advertised himself as "the man 'whose escape from slavery in 1849 in a box 3 feet 1 inch long, 2 feet wide, 2 feet six inches high, caused such a sensation in the New England States, he having traveled from Richmond, Va. To Philadelphia, a journey of 350 miles, packed as luggage in a box." The last reference to Brown appeared in the Brantford, Ontario, newspaper on Feb. 26, 1889, advertising one of his performances. There is no record of his death -- his last great disappearing act.

26. Did Black People Own Slaves?

By: Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Posted: March 4, 2013 at 12:03 AM

One of the most vexing questions in African-American history is whether free African Americans themselves owned slaves. The short answer to this question, as you might suspect, is yes, of course; some free black people in this country bought and sold other black people, and did so at least since 1654, continuing to do so right through the Civil War. For me, the really fascinating questions about black slave-owning are how many black "masters" were involved, how many slaves did they own and why did they own slaves?

The answers to these questions are complex, and historians have been arguing for some time over whether free blacks purchased family members as slaves in order to protect them -- motivated, on the one hand, by benevolence and philanthropy, as historian Carter G. Woodson put it, or whether, on the other hand, they purchased other black people "as an act of exploitation," primarily to exploit their free labor for profit, just as white slave owners did. The evidence shows that, unfortunately, both things are true. The great African-American historian, John Hope Franklin, states this clearly: "The majority of Negro owners of slaves had some personal interest in their property." But, he admits, "There were instances, however, in which free Negroes had a real economic interest in the institution of slavery and held slaves in order to improve their economic status."  

In a fascinating essay reviewing this controversy, R. Halliburton shows that free black people have owned slaves "in each of the thirteen original states and later in every state that countenanced slavery," at least since Anthony Johnson and his wife Mary went to court in Virginia in 1654 to obtain the services of their indentured servant, a black man, John Castor, for life.

And for a time, free black people could even "own" the services of white indentured servants in Virginia as well. Free blacks owned slaves in Boston by 1724 and in Connecticut by 1783; by 1790, 48 black people in Maryland owned 143 slaves. One particularly notorious black Maryland farmer named Nat Butler "regularly purchased and sold Negroes for the Southern trade," Halliburton wrote.

Perhaps the most insidious or desperate attempt to defend the right of black people to own slaves was the statement made on the eve of the Civil War by a group of free people of color in New Orleans, offering their services to the Confederacy, in part because they were fearful for their own enslavement: "The free colored population [native] of Louisiana … own slaves, and they are dearly attached to their native land … and they are ready to shed their blood for her defense. They have no sympathy for abolitionism; no love for the North, but they have plenty for Louisiana … They will fight for her in 1861 as they fought [to defend New Orleans from the British] in 1814-1815."  

These guys were, to put it bluntly, opportunists par excellence: As Noah Andre Trudeau and James G. Hollandsworth Jr. explain, once the war broke out, some of these same black men formed 14 companies of a militia composed of 440 men and were organized by the governor in May 1861 into "the Native Guards, Louisiana," swearing to fight to defend the Confederacy. Although given no combat role, the Guards -- reaching a peak of 1,000 volunteers -- became the first Civil War unit to appoint black officers. 

 When New Orleans fell in late April 1862 to the Union, about 10 percent of these men, not missing a beat, now formed the Native Guard/Corps d'Afrique to defend the Union. Joel A. Rogers noted this phenomenon in his 100 Amazing Facts: "The Negro slave-holders, like the white ones, fought to keep their chattels in the Civil War." Rogers also notes that some black men, including those in New Orleans at the outbreak of the War, "fought to perpetuate slavery."

How Many Slaves Did Blacks Own?

So what do the actual numbers of black slave owners and their slaves tell us? In 1830, the year most carefully studied by Carter G. Woodson, about 13.7 percent (319,599) of the black population was free. Of these, 3,776 free Negroes owned 12,907 slaves, out of a total of 2,009,043 slaves owned in the entire United States, so the numbers of slaves owned by black people over all was quite small by comparison with the number owned by white people. In his essay, " 'The Known World' of Free Black Slaveholders," Thomas J. Pressly, using Woodson's statistics, calculated that 54 (or about 1 percent) of these black slave owners in 1830 owned between 20 and 84 slaves; 172 (about 4 percent) owned between 10 to 19 slaves; and 3,550 (about 94 percent) each owned between 1 and 9 slaves. Crucially, 42 percent owned just one slave.

Pressly also shows that the percentage of free black slave owners as the total number of free black heads of families was quite high in several states, namely 43 percent in South Carolina, 40 percent in Louisiana, 26 percent in Mississippi, 25 percent in Alabama and 20 percent in Georgia. So why did these free black people own these slaves?

It is reasonable to assume that the 42 percent of the free black slave owners who owned just one slave probably owned a family member to protect that person, as did many of the other black slave owners who owned only slightly larger numbers of slaves. As Woodson put it in 1924's Free Negro Owners of Slaves in the United States in 1830, "The census records show that the majority of the Negro owners of slaves were such from the point of view of philanthropy. In many instances the husband purchased the wife or vice versa … Slaves of Negroes were in some cases the children of a free father who had purchased his wife. If he did not thereafter emancipate the mother, as so many such husbands failed to do, his own children were born his slaves and were thus reported to the numerators."

Moreover, Woodson explains, "Benevolent Negroes often purchased slaves to make their lot easier by granting them their freedom for a nominal sum, or by permitting them to work it out on liberal terms." In other words, these black slave-owners, the clear majority, cleverly used the system of slavery to protect their loved ones. That's the good news. 

 But not all did, and that is the bad news. Halliburton concludes, after examining the evidence, that "it would be a serious mistake to automatically assume that free blacks owned their spouse or children only for benevolent purposes." Woodson himself notes that a "small number of slaves, however, does not always signify benevolence on the part of the owner." And John Hope Franklin notes that in North Carolina, "Without doubt, there were those who possessed slaves for the purpose of advancing their [own] well-being … these Negro slaveholders were more interested in making their farms or carpenter-shops 'pay' than they were in treating their slaves humanely." For these black slaveholders, he concludes, "there was some effort to conform to the pattern established by the dominant slaveholding group within the State in the effort to elevate themselves to a position of respect and privilege." In other words, most black slave owners probably owned family members to protect them, but far too many turned to slavery to exploit the labor of other black people for profit.

Who Were These Black Slave Owners?

If we were compiling a "Rogues Gallery of Black History," the following free black slaveholders would be in it:

John Carruthers Stanly -- born a slave in Craven County, N.C., the son of an Igbo mother and her master, John Wright Stanly -- became an extraordinarily successful barber and speculator in real estate in New Bern. As Loren Schweninger points out in Black Property Owners in the South, 1790-1915, by the early 1820s, Stanly owned three plantations and 163 slaves, and even hired three white overseers to manage his property! He fathered six children with a slave woman named Kitty, and he eventually freed them. Stanly lost his estate when a loan for $14,962 he had co-signed with his white half brother, John, came due. After his brother's stroke, the loan was Stanly's sole responsibility, and he was unable to pay it.

William Ellison's fascinating story is told by Michael Johnson and James L. Roark in their book, Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South. At his death on the eve of the Civil War, Ellison was wealthier than nine out of 10 white people in South Carolina. He was born in 1790 as a slave on a plantation in the Fairfield District of the state, far up country from Charleston. In 1816, at the age of 26, he bought his own freedom, and soon bought his wife and their child. In 1822, he opened his own cotton gin, and soon became quite wealthy. By his death in 1860, he owned 900 acres of land and 63 slaves. Not one of his slaves was allowed to purchase his or her own freedom.

Louisiana, as we have seen, was its own bizarre world of color, class, caste and slavery. By 1830, in Louisiana, several black people there owned a large number of slaves, including the following: In Pointe Coupee Parish alone, Sophie Delhonde owned 38 slaves; Lefroix Decuire owned 59 slaves; Antoine Decuire owned 70 slaves; Leandre Severin owned 60 slaves; and Victor Duperon owned 10. In St. John the Baptist Parish, Victoire Deslondes owned 52 slaves; in Plaquemine Brule, Martin Donatto owned 75 slaves; in Bayou Teche, Jean B. Muillion owned 52 slaves; Martin Lenormand in St. Martin Parish owned 44 slaves; Verret Polen in West Baton Rouge Parish owned 69 slaves; Francis Jerod in Washita Parish owned 33 slaves; and Cecee McCarty in the Upper Suburbs of New Orleans owned 32 slaves. Incredibly, the 13 members of the Metoyer family in Natchitoches Parish -- including Nicolas Augustin Metoyer, pictured -- collectively owned 215 slaves

Antoine Dubuclet and his wife Claire Pollard owned more than 70 slaves in Iberville Parish when they married. According to Thomas Clarkin, by 1864, in the midst of the Civil War, they owned 100 slaves, worth $94,700. During Reconstruction, he became the state's first black treasurer, serving between 1868 and 1878.

Andrew Durnford was a sugar planter and a physician who owned the St. Rosalie plantation, 33 miles south of New Orleans. In the late 1820s, David O. Whitten tells us, he paid $7,000 for seven male slaves, five females and two children. He traveled all the way to Virginia in the 1830s and purchased 24 more. Eventually, he would own 77 slaves. When a fellow Creole slave owner liberated 85 of his slaves and shipped them off to Liberia, Durnford commented that he couldn't do that, because "self interest is too strongly rooted in the bosom of all that breathes the American atmosphere."

It would be a mistake to think that large black slaveholders were only men. In 1830, in Louisiana, the aforementioned Madame Antoine Dublucet owned 44 slaves, and Madame Ciprien Ricard owned 35 slaves, Louise Divivier owned 17 slaves, Genevieve Rigobert owned 16 slaves and Rose Lanoix and Caroline Miller both owned 13 slaves, while over in Georgia, Betsey Perry owned 25 slaves. According to Johnson and Roark, the wealthiest black person in Charleston, S.C., in 1860 was Maria Weston, who owned 14 slaves and property valued at more than $40,000, at a time when the average white man earned about $100 a year. (The city's largest black slaveholders, though, were Justus Angel and Mistress L. Horry, both of whom owned 84 slaves.) 

In Savannah, Ga., between 1823 and 1828, according to Betty Wood's Gender, Race, and Rank in a Revolutionary Age, Hannah Leion owned nine slaves, while the largest slaveholder in 1860 was Ciprien Ricard, who had a sugarcane plantation in Louisiana and owned 152 slaves with her son, Pierre -- many more that the 35 she owned in 1830. According to economic historian Stanley Engerman, "In Charleston, South Carolina about 42 percent of free blacks owned slaves in 1850, and about 64 percent of these slaveholders were women." Greed, in other words, was gender-blind.

Why They Owned SlavesThese men and women, from William Stanly to Madame Ciprien Ricard, were among the largest free Negro slaveholders, and their motivations were neither benevolent nor philanthropic. One would be hard-pressed to account for their ownership of such large numbers of slaves except as avaricious, rapacious, acquisitive and predatory.

But lest we romanticize all of those small black slave owners who ostensibly purchased family members only for humanitarian reasons, even in these cases the evidence can be problematic. Halliburton, citing examples from an essay in the North American Review by Calvin Wilson in 1905, presents some hair-raising challenges to the idea that black people who owned their own family members always treated them well:

A free black in Trimble County, Kentucky, " … sold his own son and daughter South, one for $1,000, the other for $1,200." … A Maryland father sold his slave children in order to purchase his wife. A Columbus, Georgia, black woman -- Dilsey Pope -- owned her husband. "He offended her in some way and she sold him … " Fanny Canady of Louisville, Kentucky, owned her husband Jim -- a drunken cobbler -- whom she threatened to "sell down the river." At New Bern, North Carolina, a free black wife and son purchased their slave husband-father. When the newly bought father criticized his son, the son sold him to a slave trader. The son boasted afterward that "the old man had gone to the corn fields about New Orleans where they might learn him some manners." 

Carter Woodson, too, tells us that some of the husbands who purchased their spouses "were not anxious to liberate their wives immediately. They considered it advisable to put them on probation for a few years, and if they did not find them satisfactory they would sell their wives as other slave holders disposed of Negroes." He then relates the example of a black man, a shoemaker in Charleston, S.C., who purchased his wife for $700. But "on finding her hard to please, he sold her a few months thereafter for $750, gaining $50 by the transaction."

Most of us will find the news that some black people bought and sold other black people for profit quite distressing, as well we should. But given the long history of class divisions in the black community, which Martin R. Delany as early as the 1850s described as "a nation within a nation," and given the role of African elites in the long history of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, perhaps we should not be surprised that we can find examples throughout black history of just about every sort of human behavior, from the most noble to the most heinous, that we find in any other people's history.

The good news, scholars agree, is that by 1860 the number of free blacks owning slaves had markedly decreased from 1830. In fact, Loren Schweninger concludes that by the eve of the Civil War, "the phenomenon of free blacks owning slaves had nearly disappeared" in the Upper South, even if it had not in places such as Louisiana in the Lower South. Nevertheless, it is a very sad aspect of African-American history that slavery sometimes could be a colorblind affair, and that the evil business of owning another human being could manifest itself in both males and females, and in black as well as white.

27. "All servants imported and brought into the Country...who were not Christians in their native Country...shall be accounted and be slaves. All Negro, mulatto and Indian slaves within this dominion...shall be held to be real estate. If any slave resist his master...correcting such slave, and shall happen to be killed in such correction...the master shall be free of all punishment ...as if such accident never happened." Virginia Slave Statute, 1705

28. January 4, 2013, Escaping Slavery

By CHARLES M. BLOW

America has slavery on the brain these days.

There were the recent releases of the movies “Lincoln” (which I found enlightening and enjoyable) and “Django Unchained” (which I found a profound love story with an orgy of excesses and muddled moralities). I guess my preferences reflect my penchant for subtlety. Sometimes a little bit of an unsettling thing goes a long way, and a lot goes too far. Aside from its gratuitous goriness, “Django Unchained” reportedly used the N-word more than 100 times. “Lincoln” used it only a handful. I don’t know exactly where my threshold is, but I think it’s well shy of the century mark.

And there was this week the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, one of the most important documents in this country’s archives.

All of this has caused me to think deeply about the long shadow of slavery, the legacy of that most grievous enterprise and the ways in which that poison tree continues to bear fruit.

To be sure, America has moved light-years forward from the days of slavery. But the idea that progress toward racial harmony would or should be steady and continuous is fraying. And the pillars of the institution — the fundamental devaluation of dark skin and strained justifications for the unconscionable — have proved surprisingly resilient.

For instance, in October, The Arkansas Times reported that Jon Hubbard, a Republican state representative, wrote in a 2009 self-published book that “the institution of slavery that the black race has long believed to be an abomination upon its people may actually have been a blessing in disguise.” His misguided point was that for all the horrors of slavery, blacks were better off in America than in Africa.

This was a prevailing, wrongheaded, ethically empty justification for American slavery when it was legal.

Robert E. Lee wrote in 1856: “The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, physically, and socially. The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their further instruction as a race, and will prepare them, I hope, for better things.”

And in a famous 1837 speech on the Senate floor, John C. Calhoun declared: “I hold that in the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin, and distinguished by color, and other physical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding States between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good — a positive good.”

Lee was later appointed commander in chief of the armies of the South, and Calhoun had been vice president and became secretary of state. But in November, Hubbard lost his seat; I guess that’s progress.

Still, the persistence of such a ridiculous argument does not sit well with me. And we should all be unsettled by the tendency of some people to romanticize and empathize with the Confederacy.

A Pew Research Center poll released in April 2011 found that most Southern whites think it’s appropriate for modern-day politicians to praise Confederate leaders, the only demographic to believe that.

A CNN poll also released that month found that nearly 4 in 10 white Southerners sympathize more with the Confederacy than with the Union.

What is perhaps more problematic is that negative attitudes about blacks are increasing. According to an October survey by The Associated Press: “In all, 51 percent of Americans now express explicit anti-black attitudes, compared with 48 percent in a similar 2008 survey. When measured by an implicit racial attitudes test, the number of Americans with anti-black sentiments jumped to 56 percent, up from 49 percent during the last presidential election.”

Not progress.

In fact, it feels as though slavery as an analogy has become subversively chic. Herman Cain, running as a Republican presidential candidate, built an entire campaign around this not-so-coded language, saying that he had left “the Democrat plantation,” calling blacks “brainwashed” and arguing, “I don’t believe racism in this country today holds anybody back in a big way.”

As the best-selling author Michelle Alexander pointed out in her sensational 2010 book “The New Jim Crow,” various factors, including the methodical mass incarceration of black men, has led to the disintegration of the black family, the disenfranchisement of millions of people, and a new and very real era of American oppression.

As Alexander confirmed to me Friday: “Today there are more African-American adults under correctional control — in prison or jail, on probation or parole — than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.”

Definitely not progress.

29.

TABLE 2
Population of the South 1790-1860 by type

Year	White	Free Nonwhite	Slave
1790	1,240,454	32,523	654,121
1800	1,691,892	61,575	851,532
1810	2,118,144	97,284	1,103,700
1820	2,867,454	130,487	1,509,904
1830	3,614,600	175,074	1,983,860
1840	4,601,873	207,214	2,481,390
1850	6,184,477	235,821	3,200,364
1860	8,036,700	253,082	3,950,511

Source: Historical Statistics of the U.S. (1970).

Holdings of Southern Slaveowners
by states, 1860

State	Total	Held 1	Held 2	Held 3	Held 4	Held 5	Held 1-5	Held 100-	Held 500+
	slaveholders	slave	slaves	Slaves	slaves	slaves	slaves	499 slaves	slaves
AL	33,730	5,607	3,663	2,805	2,329	1,986	16,390	344	-
AR	11,481	2,339	1,503	1,070	894	730	6,536	65	1
DE	587	237	114	74	51	34	510	-	-
FL	5,152	863	568	437	365	285	2,518	47	-
GA	41,084	6,713	4,335	3,482	2,984	2,543	20,057	211	8
KY	38,645	9,306	5,430	4,009	3,281	2,694	24,720	7	-
LA	22,033	4,092	2,573	2,034	1,536	1,310	11,545	543	4
MD	13,783	4,119	1,952	1,279	1,023	815	9,188	16	-
MS	30,943	4,856	3,201	2,503	2,129	1,809	14,498	315	1
MO	24,320	6,893	3,754	2,773	2,243	1,686	17,349	4	-
NC	34,658	6,440	4,017	3,068	2,546	2,245	18,316	133	-
SC	26,701	3,763	2,533	1,990	1,731	1,541	11,558	441	8
TN	36,844	7,820	4,738	3,609	3,012	2,536	21,715	47	-
TX	21,878	4,593	2,874	2,093	1,782	1,439	12,781	54	-
VA	52,128	11,085	5,989	4,474	3,807	3,233	28,588	114	-
TOTAL	393,967	78,726	47,244	35,700	29,713	24,886	216,269	2,341	22

Source: Historical Statistics of the United States (1970).