9781422274224

Rare Glimpses of Slave Life

Rare Glimpses of Slave Life

CAUSES OF THE CIVIL WAR

ESCAPE FROM SLAVERY: ABOLITIONISTS AND THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD RECONSTRUCTION AND ITS AFTERMATH: FREED SLAVES AFTER THE CIVIL WAR

SLAVE LIFE ON A SOUTHERN PLANTATION

SLAVE REVOLTS AND REBELLIONS

THE SLAVE TRADE IN COLONIAL AMERICA

WOMEN AND CHILDREN IN SLAVERY

Rare Glimpses of Slave Life

KATRIN E. SJURSEN

MASON CREST PHIL ADELPHIA | MIAMI

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ISBN (hardback) 978-1-4222-4407-4 ISBN (series) 978-1-4222-4402-9 ISBN (ebook) 978-1-4222-7422-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file at the Library of Congress Interior and cover design: Torque Advertising + Design Production: Michelle Luke

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T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S Chapter 1: Fighting Back Against Slavery.....................7 Chapter 2: The Stono Rebellion................................. 19 Chapter 3: The New York Slave Conspiracy................. 31 Chapter 4: Gabriel’s Rebellion................................... 43 Chapter 5: Nat Turner’s Revolt.................................. 53 Chapter 6: The Amistad............................................. 63 Series Glossary of Key Terms. .................................... 74 Further Reading and Internet Resources.................... 75 Chronology............................................................... 76 Index........................................................................ 78 Author’s Biography and Credits................................. 80 K E Y I C O N S T O L O O K F O R : Words to Understand: These words with their easy-to-understand definitions will increase the reader’s understanding of the text while building vocabulary skills. Sidebars: This boxed material within the main text allows readers to build knowledge, gain insights, explore possibilities, and broaden their perspectives by weaving together additional information to provide realistic and holistic perspectives. Educational videos: Readers can view videos by scanning our QR codes, providing them with additional educational content to supplement the text. Examples include news coverage, moments in history, speeches, iconic sports moments, and much more! Text-Dependent Questions: These questions send the reader back to the text for more careful attention to the evidence presented there. Research Projects: Readers are pointed toward areas of further inquiry connected to each chapter. Suggestions are provided for projects that encourage deeper research and analysis. Series Glossary of Key Terms: This back-of-the-book glossary contains terminology used throughout this series. Words found here increase the reader’s ability to read and comprehend higher-level books and articles in this field.

This illustration depicts the 1619 arrival of 20 African captives at Jamestown, in the British colony of Virginia. By the end of the seventeenth century, slavery would be legal throughout Britain’s North American colonies.

WORDS TO UNDERSTAND Abolitionists worked for the abolition, or elimination, of slavery Arson is the crime of deliberately setting a fire for evil or bad purposes. Barracoons were enclosures or barracks where Africans were held temporarily when they arrived and were awaiting sale as slaves To emancipate someone is to give him his freedom from slavery Indentured servants were people who were bound by law to work for someone for a set period of years until their debt to that person had been paid. These servants were not free, but they did have certain rights, unlike slaves, who were considered to be property

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Fighting Back Against Slavery Madison Washington was about twenty-two years old when he led a revolt on board the Creole , a merchant ship transporting 135 slaves from Richmond, Virginia to New Orleans, Louisiana. The sugar and cotton plantations of the deep South had earned a reputation for extremely harsh treatment and hard labor, and slaves living in the upper South feared the possibility that their masters might decide to “sell them South.” The very possibility was enough to cause a slave to attempt to run away, or—as was the case of the human cargo aboard the Creole —to fight for their lives and their freedom. According to a fictionalized account written by the former- slave-turned- abolitionist William Wells Brown twenty years after the event, Madison Washington had plotted revolts from his early childhood, while he was working under three different masters. As the story goes, Washington had escaped to Canada and found a job that paid well, but he gave up this freedom to return south in the hopes of sneaking his beloved wife Susan to freedom as well. Captured at the very last moment, his former master sold him to a slaver who intended to bring Washington to the deep South. While none of the details of Washington’s early life can be verified, his actions aboard the Creole in November 1841 are certain. Washington and three other male slaves that he had just met on this journey were the ringleaders. They convinced fifteen

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William Wells Brown escaped slavery at age nineteen, and became a well-known abolitionist and author. In 1862 he wrote a short biography of Madison Washington and the rebellion he led aboard the Creole. Brown described Washington as “one whose tall figure, firm step, and piercing eye attracted at once the attention of all who beheld him.”

other slaves to overpower the crew and sail the ship to the British West Indies, a group of Caribbean islands controlled by Great Britain. The British had abolished slavery throughout their empire seven years earlier, so officials in the Bahamas chose to free the Creole slaves, rather than return them to the United States as the American government requested. The nineteen Creole rebels were placed on trial for their actions, but were acquitted in April 1842. Because slavery was illegal, the British court ruled that the slaves had the right to use force to escape from their confinement. In terms of numbers of slaves freed, Madison Washington had led one of the most successful slave revolts in American history. THE BIRTH OF AMERICAN SLAVERY The institution of American slavery, as well as resistance to it, pre-dated the birth of the United States in 1776. The first Africans brought to the New World, as the Europeans called the Americas, arrived on the island of Hispaniola in 1502. The Spanish who settled there had already killed off most of the Native Americans. They needed needed slave labor to work on farms and mines so that their colony would thrive. As the Spanish established other settlements in Mexico, South America, and the Caribbean, slavery

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expanded into these areas as well. The Portuguese, who settled in Brazil, brought slaves to the Americas from their colonies in Africa. During the sixteenth century,

a trade triangle formed. White Europeans would transport African slaves across the Atlantic to the Americas. They exchanged them in the various colonies for gold and silver, or for valuable raw goods such as

DID YOU KNOW ? The first recorded slave revolt in the Americas began on Christmas day in 1521, when slaves belonging to Diego Colón, the son of Christopher Columbus, rose up on the island of Hispaniola. The rebellion lasted one week before it was suppressed.

sugar, tobacco, or cotton. These were shipped to Europe, where they were sold for a profit, or traded for finished goods that African chiefs wanted. The ships then returned to Africa, where they traded the desired goods to acquire more slaves. From the sixteenth through the nineteenth century, more than 12 million Africans made the “middle passage”—the trip across the Atlantic Ocean—in crowded slave ships. A relatively small percentage—about 450,000 Africans—were sold to the British colonies in North America, between 1619 and 1808. At first, these unwilling Africans were not considered slaves; instead, they were indentured servants , required to work for seven years—just like poor whites who had been sent to solve the British colonies’ labor shortage. Within a generation, however, a system of permanent slavery emerged in the British colonies. In 1641, the Massachusetts Bay Colony became the first to legalize slavery. Other colonies soon followed Massachusetts’s lead, enacting laws that legalized and regulated slavery.

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Fighting Back Against Slavery

In the northern colonies, slaves tended to live in cities and work as craftsmen or as domestic servants, whereas slaves in the South often lived on farms. Large plantations with more than forty slaves did exist, particularly in the deep South, but they were not common. EFFECTS OF THE AMERICAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE After the American Revolution in the late 1700s, with the talk of independence, liberty, and equality, some people in the northern states grew uneasy about the idea of slavery. Inspired by the Declaration of Independence, Vermont abolished slavery in 1777. By 1800, most of the other northern states had enacted laws prohibiting slavery; New Jersey was the last to make slavery illegal, in 1804. Most of the laws in the northern states called for gradual emancipation . This gave slave owners time to sell their slaves “down South” so that they did not lose their financial investment. This illustration shows a slave-trading compound on the coast of what is now Nigeria. The flags of various European nations that purchased slaves, including Portugal, France, Great Britain, and the Netherland, fly over different areas of the compound where slaves were kept.

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THE MIDDLE PASSAGE

Africans endured three parts in their journey to becoming slaves in the Americas. First, they were rounded up by African slavers and marched to ports on the coastline, where they were imprisoned in pens called barracoons. European slave traders purchased the slaves from the barracoons , and took them across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas. This trip aboard ship was called the Middle Passage, and usually lasted between six and eight weeks. Once they arrived, slaves were sold at markets in American ports and sent to their new homes. On board the slave ships for the Atlantic crossing, male slaves were chained below decks and tightly packed together, while women and children were usually left unchained. Of the 12 million Africans transported to America, it is estimated that two million died at sea due to the terrible conditions. An African named Olaudah Equiano, who later escaped slavery, described his experience on the Middle Passage: The closeness[s] of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on the sicknes[s] amongst the slaves, of which many died, thus falling victims to the improvident avarice, as I may call it, of their purchasers. This wretched situation was again aggravated by the galling of the chains, now become insupportable; and the filth of the [toilet] tubs, into which the children often fell, and were almost suffocated. The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable.

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Fighting Back Against Slavery

This British drawing from 1790 shows how nearly 300 slaves could be packed into the tight quarters of a ship for the Middle Passage from Africa to the Americas.

Even though slavery was largely prohibited in the North, the northern states benefitted from and participated in the maintenance of the institution of slavery in many ways. For example, textile mills in New England and other northern states purchased the cotton produced by slave plantations, then sold the finished cloth to people in the southern states. Northern bankers loaned money to southern plantation owners so that they could buy more land and slaves, and northern merchants profited by shipping cotton, rice, tobacco and other slave-produced goods throughout the United States and Europe. Abolitionists hoped that the institution of slavery could be forced into a slow death across the nation if they could cut off the supply of fresh slaves. Southern slave owners fiercely opposed any tampering with the slave trade, but in 1808 the US DID YOU KNOW ? In 1860, there were 488,070 free blacks in the United States. A little more than half of them (261,918) lived in southern states, where slavery was still legal. government made it illegal to import new slaves from Africa. However, buying and selling of slaves

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SLAVE REVOLTS AND REBELLIONS

within the United States was still legal. The children of slaves were also considered slaves, so the institution not only continued but it grew. There were about a million slaves in the United States in 1808, when the trans-Atlantic slave trade was abolished; that figure grew to 4 million by 1860. SLAVE LIFE Whether they came from Africa or were born in the United States, slaves had very few rights. Typically, it was illegal for slaves to testify in court, to be taught to read or write, to own property of their own, and even to marry. In addition, slaves had to endure poor living conditions and physical abuse. Many slave owners justified their positions by arguing that black people were less intelligent and trustworthy than whites and that they needed a firm owner to take care of them. Thus, some owners bragged that they provided slaves with a blanket, a pair of new shoes and two new sets of clothing—one for summer and one for winter—each year. They also provided their housing. The slaves were not quite as impressed with the quality of the goods and accommodations provided for them. Frederick Douglass, a

Scan here for a short clip on the horrors of

the domestic slave trade.

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Fighting Back Against Slavery

former slave who became a famous abolitionist speaker, explained: I suffered much from hunger, but much more from cold. In hottest summer and coldest winter, I was kept almost naked—no shoes, no stockings, no jacket, no trousers, nothing on but a coarse tow linen shirt, reaching only to my knees. I had no bed. I must have perished with cold, but that, the coldest nights, I used to steal a bag which was used for carrying corn to the mill. I would crawl into this bag, and there sleep on the cold, damp, clay floor, with my head in and feet out. Owners also felt justified in punishing their slaves however they saw fit, sometimes even before a slave did anything wrong, just to remind him or her not to step out of line. William Wells Brown remembered how his owner had hired him out to a particularly foul-tempered man who regularly got so angry that he would “take up a chair, and throw it at a servant; and in his more rational moments, when he wished to chastise one, he would tie them up in the smoke-house, and whip them; after which, he would cause a

Five generations of black American slaves outside their modest home on a South Carolina plantation.

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SLAVE REVOLTS AND REBELLIONS

A plantation overseer named Austin Gore shoots a slave who has resisted punishment. This illustration depicts an incident of punishment described by Frederick Douglass in his 1845 book “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”.

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Fighting Back Against Slavery

fire to be made of tobacco stems, and smoke them. This he called ‘Virginia play.’” When William complained about the treatment to his owner, “it made no difference. He cared nothing about it, so long as he received the money for my labor.”  RESISTANCE Madison Washington, who led the slave revolt aboard the Creole , had risked his life to avoid the harsh treatment of the plantations, but there was no shortage of reasons to prompt a slave to flee bondage or fight for personal liberty. Likewise, there was no shortage of ways in which slaves resisted their situation in life. Many slaves simply ran away, though their goals might vary depending on their family situations. For example, some slaves might choose to run away for a few days to visit a nearby relative who lived on another plantation. Others, like William Wells Brown, managed to make use of abolitionist networks like the Underground Railroad to find freedom in the northern states or Canada. Still others made their own way north to freedom, like Josiah Henson and his family. Josiah walked hundreds of miles from Kentucky to Canada, carrying his two youngest children in a knapsack on his back. His wife and older two children plodded alongside him as the family escaped the slave system. Much more commonly, slaves resisted in subtle ways that would result in economic loss or hardship for their owners. Because slaves did all the labor, they could reduce a farm’s productivity by claiming to be too sick to work, slowing down their work pace, breaking tools, or pretending to be too stupid to understand orders. Arson was also a common tactic. Large-scale rebellions were the least common form of slave resistance. These required planning and communication, which was hard to arrange when slaves were restricted from traveling and forbidden to learn to read or write. However, slaves did find ways to rebel on a large scale, with varying degrees of success.

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