The Great Stain

by Noel Rae

  Like James Pennington and William Wells Brown, most fugitives headed north to a free state, or, particularly after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, to Canada. But there were also many who headed south. Until its acquisition by the United States and the wars that led to the expulsion of the Seminoles, Florida had been a popular destination. Mexico, which had abolished slavery in 1829, was another place of refuge. When traveling through Texas in the 1850s Frederick Law Olmsted reported on three episodes concerning runaways.

  The first happened soon after he arrived at a town called Victoria. Here Olmsted overheard some men discussing a slave who had recently escaped after attacking his owner, a local judge—“cut the judge right bad. Like to have killed the judge. Cut his young master too.”

  “Reckon, if they caught him, ’twould go rather hard with him.”

  “Reckon ’twould. We caught him once, but he got away from us again. We was just tying his feet together, and he give me a kick in the face, and broke. I had my six-shooter handy, and I tried to shoot him, but every barrel missed fire. Been loaded a week. We shot at him three times with rifles, but he’d got too far off, and we didn’t hit, but we must have shaved him close. We chased him, and my dog got close to him once. If he’d gripped him, we should have got him, but he had a dog himself, and just as my dog got within about a yard of him, his dog turned and fit my dog, and he hurt him so bad we couldn’t get him to run again. We run him close, though, I tell you. Run him out of his coat, and his boots, and a pistol he’d got. But ’twas getting towards dark, and he got into them bayous, and kept swimming from one side to another.”

  “If he’s got across the river, he’d get to the Mexicans in two days, and there he’d be safe. The Mexicans’d take care of him.”

  From a St. Louis newspaper, an 1847 advertisement for runaways, in this case a family of five: the father “known by the name of Washington,” his wife, Mary, “a bright mulatto woman,” and three children, aged twelve, six and four. The reward was $150 “if taken within 100 miles of St. Louis, and $200 if taken beyond that, and secured so that I can get them.”

  Olmsted’s second report came after he and some companions had crossed the Rio Grande into Mexico at Piedras Negras, where the people were “lounging outside their doors, chatting cheerfully, laughing, and singing a great deal, nearly all smoking.”

  “As we turned a corner near the bank we came suddenly upon two Negroes as they were crossing the street. One of them was startled, and looking ashamed and confounded, turned hesitatingly and walked away from us; whereat some Mexican children laughed, and the other Negro, looking at us, grinned impudently, expressing plainly enough, ‘I am not afraid of you.’ He touched his hat, however, when I nodded to him and then, putting his hands in his pockets, as if he hadn’t meant to, stepped up on one of the sand-bank caverns, whistling. Thither, wishing to have some conversation with him, I followed. He very civilly informed me, in answer to inquiries, that he was born in Virginia, and had been brought south by a trader and sold to a gentleman who had brought him to Texas, from whom he had run away four or five years ago. He would like right well to see old Virginia again, that he would—if he could be free. He was a mechanic, and could earn a dollar very easily by his trade every day. He could speak Spanish fluently and had traveled extensively in Mexico, sometimes on his own business, and sometimes as a servant or muleteer. Once he had been beyond Durango, or nearly to the Pacific; and northward to Chihuahua, and he professed to be competent as a guide to any part of Northern Mexico. He had joined the Catholic True Church, he said, and he was very well satisfied with the country.

  “Runaways were constantly arriving here; two had got over, as I had previously been informed, the night before. He could not guess how many came in a year, but he could count forty that he had known of in the last three months. At other points, further down the river, a great many more came than here. He supposed a good many got lost and starved to death, or were killed on the way, between the settlements and the river. Most of them brought with them money, which they had earned and hoarded for the purpose, or some small articles which they had stolen from their masters. They had never been used to taking care of themselves, and when they first got here were so excited with being free, and with being made so much of by these Mexican women, that they spent all they brought very soon; generally they gave it all away to the women, and in a short time they had nothing to live upon, and not knowing the language of the country they couldn’t find any work to do, and often they were very poor and miserable. But after they had learned the language, which did not generally take them long if they chose to be industrious, they could live very comfortably. Wages were low, but they had all they earned for their own, and a man’s living didn’t cost him much here. Colored men who were industrious and saving always did well; they could make money faster than Mexicans themselves because they had more sense. The Mexican Government was very just to them, they could always have their rights as fully protected as if they were Mexicans born. He mentioned to me several Negroes whom he had seen, in different parts of the country, who had acquired wealth and positions of honor. Some of them had connected themselves by marriage with rich old Spanish families who thought as much of themselves as the best white people in Virginia. In fact, a colored man, if he could behave himself decently, had rather an advantage over a white American, he thought. The people generally liked them better. These Texas folks were too rough to suit them.”

  According to Olmsted, these statements were confirmed “in all essential particulars, by every foreigner I saw who had lived or traveled in this part of Mexico, as well as by Mexicans themselves.” Indeed, back in the American South, “it is repeated as a standing joke—I suppose I have heard it fifty times in the Texas taverns, and always to the great amusement of the company—that a nigger in Mexico is just as good as a white man.”

  Olmsted was impressed by the courage of the escaping slaves. “There is a permanent reward offered by the state [of Texas] for their recovery, and a considerable number of men make a business of hunting them”—including the so-called “filibusters” who made illegal raids across the border. “Most of the frontier rangers are ready at any time to make a couple of hundred dollars by taking them up, if they come in their way … If they escape immediate capture by dogs or men, there is then the great dry desert country to be crossed, with the danger of falling in with savages, or of being attacked by panthers or wolves, or of being bitten or stung by the numerous reptiles that abound in it; of drowning miserably at the last of the fords; in winter of freezing in a norther, and, at all seasons, of famishing in the wilderness for want of means to procure food. Brave Negro! say I.”

  His third story was copied from the West Feliciana Whig:

  “On Saturday last, a runaway Negro was killed in the parish of East Baton Rouge, just below the line of this parish, under the following circumstances: Two citizens of Port Hudson, learning that a Negro was at work on a flat boat, loading with sand, just below that place, who was suspected of being a runaway, went down in a skiff for the purpose of arresting him. Having seized him and put him into the skiff they started back, but had not proceeded far when the Negro, who had been at the oars, seized a hatchet and assaulted one of them, wounding him very seriously. A scuffle ensued, in which both parties fell overboard. They were both rescued by the citizen pulling to them with the skiff. Finding him so unmanageable, the Negro was put ashore, and the parties returned to Port Hudson for arms and a pack of Negro dogs, and started again with the intention to capture him. They soon got on his trail, and when found again he was standing at bay upon the outer edge of a large raft of drift wood, armed with a club and pistol.

  “In this position he bade defiance to men and dogs—knocking the latter into the water with his club, and resolutely threatening death to any man who approached him. Finding him obstinately determined not to surrender, one of his pursuers shot him. He fell at the third fire, and so determined was he not to be captured, that when an effo
rt was made to rescue him from drowning he made battle with his club, and sunk waving his weapon in angry defiance at his pursuers.”

  A contemporary woodcut published shortly after Nat Turner’s Rebellion. The text below reads: “The Scenes which the above Plate is designed to represent are: Fig 1. A Mother intreating for the lives of her children.—2. Mr. Travis cruelly murdered by his own Slaves.—3. Mr. Barrow, who bravely defended himself until his wife escaped.—4. A company of mounted Dragoons in pursuit of the Blacks.” Turner’s 1831 rebellion was the country’s bloodiest slave uprising.

  CHAPTER 11

  RESISTANCE

  THE NINETEENTH CENTURY GOT OFF TO A BAD START FOR THE MASTER CLASS: 1800 was the year that Denmark Vesey, having won $1500 in a state lottery, bought his freedom; that Nat Turner and John Brown were born; and that Richmond, Virginia, was thrown into a panic by an aborted uprising led by a young blacksmith called Gabriel Prosser.

  But even before the century began, great alarm was caused in this country by events in Haiti, then a French colony and called Saint Domingue, or St. Domingo. Known as “the pearl of the West Indies,” its coffee and sugar plantations produced fabulous amounts of money for their aristocratic owners who—or at least until the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789—spent most of it on high living in Paris. This absenteeism was one of the features that differentiated Saint Domingue from the American South. Another was the existence of a large class of free blacks and mulattoes known as gens de couleur, who aspired to equality with whites. Yet another was the ratio of slaves to whites—about five hundred thousand to fifty thousand, or ten to one. On paper, the slaves were protected by the laws of the Code Noir, but for the most part these were a dead letter, and there were many reports of insanely brutal tortures carried out by owners, such as slaves being buried alive, or staked out on their backs so that birds could pick out their eyes, or scalded to death by having boiling sugar poured over them. Also unlike American slavery was the French obsession with parsing negritude, so that there were, at least in theory, no fewer than 128 categories, starting with full blacks, and following with mulattoes, who were half white, quadroons, who were a quarter white, octoroons, an eighth, marabous, griffes, sacatras and so on, and not forgetting the sang-mêlés, who were 127 parts white and one part black. To add to the social divisions, there were deep political rifts caused by the French Revolution, most notably those between royalists and republicans.

  Despite these special circumstances, what happened in Haiti shocked slave-owners everywhere. Bryan Edwards, a naturalist and historian who lived in the British West Indies, gives this account:

  “In the month of September, 1791, when I was at Spanish Town in Jamaica, two French gentlemen were introduced to me who were just arrived from St. Domingo, with information that the Negro slaves belonging to the French part of that island, to the number, as was believed, of 100,000 and upwards had revolted, and were spreading death and desolation over the whole of the northern province. They reported that the governor-general, considering the situation of the colony as a common cause among the white inhabitants of all nations in the West Indies, had dispatched commissioners to the neighbouring islands, as well as to the States of North America, to request immediate assistance.”

  Although Britain and France were traditional enemies, the appeal to white solidarity hit home. Two Royal Navy frigates and a sloop of war were made ready, military supplies were loaded, the French commissioners went on board, and “I was easily persuaded to accompany them.”

  “We arrived in the harbour of Cape François in the evening of the 26th of September, and the first object which arrested our attention as we approached was a dreadful scene of devastation by fire. The noble plain adjoining the Cape was covered with ashes, and the surrounding hills, as far as the eye could reach, everywhere presented to us ruins still smoking, and houses and plantations at that moment in flames. It was a sight more terrible than the mind of any man, unaccustomed to such a scene, can easily conceive.”

  Edwards summarized what he had been told.

  “It was on the morning of the 23rd of August, just before day, that a general alarm and consternation spread throughout the towns of the Cape. The inhabitants were called from their beds by persons who reported that all the Negro slaves in the several neighbouring parishes had revolted, and were at that moment carrying death and desolation over the adjoining large and beautiful plain to the northeast. The governor and most of the military officers on duty assembled together, but the reports were so confused and contradictory as to gain but little credit; when, as day-light began to break, the sudden and successive arrival, with ghastly countenances, of persons who had with difficulty escaped the massacre and flown to the town for protection, brought a dreadful confirmation of the fatal tidings.

  “The approach of day-light served only to discover sights of horror. It was now apparent that the Negroes on all the estates of the plain acted in concert, and a general massacre of the whites took place in every quarter. On some few estates, indeed, the lives of the women were spared, but they were reserved only to gratify the brutal appetites of the ruffians; and it is shocking to relate that many of them suffered violation on the dead bodies of their husbands and fathers!”

  There were many other such horror stories. “The largest sugar-plantation on the plain was that of Mons. Gallifet, situated about eight miles from the town, the Negroes belonging to which had always been treated with much kindness and liberality.” But when the overseer went to see what was happening “to his surprise and grief he found all the Negroes in arms on the side of the rebels, and (horrid to tell!) their standard was the body of a white infant which they had recently impaled on a stake!” The overseer was killed but others escaped “and conveyed the dreadful tidings to the inhabitants of the town.” Meanwhile “the ruffians exchanged the sword for the torch. The buildings and cane-fields were everywhere set on fire; and the conflagrations, which were visible from the town, in a thousand different quarters, furnished a prospect more shocking, and reflections more dismal, than fancy can paint or the powers of man describe. Consternation and terror now took possession of every mind: and the screams of the women and children running from door to door heightened the horrors of the scene.”

  “[The country was] wholly abandoned to the ravages of the enemy … All the white, and even the mulatto children whose fathers had not joined in the revolt, were murdered without exception, frequently before the eyes, or clinging to the bosoms, of their mothers. Young women of all ranks were first violated by a whole troop of barbarians, and then generally put to death … In the parish of Limbé, at a place called the Great Ravine, a venerable planter, the father of two beautiful young ladies, was tied down by a savage ringleader of a band, who ravished the eldest daughter in his presence, and delivered over the youngest to one of his followers. Their passion being satisfied, they slaughtered both the father and the daughters.”

  In assigning blame for these events, Edwards, while offering some mild reprimands on the conduct of the owners, came down hard on the French reformers called Les Amis des Noirs and the British Association for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, led by William Wilberforce—“pestilent reformers” whose “vile machinations” and “pretences to philanthropy were as gross a mockery of human reason as their conduct was an outrage on all the feelings of our nature.” Among other activities “they distributed at a prodigious expense throughout the colonies tracts and pamphlets without number, the direct tendency of which was to render the white inhabitants odious and contemptible in the eyes of their own slaves, and excite in the latter such ideas of their natural rights and equality of condition as should lead them to a general struggle for freedom through rebellion and bloodshed. In many of those writings, arguments are expressly adduced, in language which cannot be misunderstood, to urge the Negroes to rise up and murder their masters without mercy …”

  Many of the whites who survived the massacres came to live in the South, where they kept the
ir stories alive. To them, and to American slaveholders, the lessons of Haiti were obvious: with a few exceptions, Negro slaves were essentially savages, thirsting for blood and lusting after white women; kindness was wasted on people who did not know the meaning of gratitude; beware of outside agitators distributing subversive tracts; and never let down your guard. In the meantime they had to watch incredulously as first a British army of some 15,000 men lost more than half its number in a failed attempt to conquer the island, and then as an even larger French army suffered the same fate. To be sure, these defeats were largely due to the yellow fever, but the result, after many more years of strife and bloodshed, was the establishment, just a few hundred miles from the coast of the United States, of an independent, self-governing, and seemingly impregnable republic of former slaves—an abomination for owners, “a city upon a hill” for black people, slave or free.