Five Thousand Years of Slavery

by Marjorie Gann

  In the port city of Georgetown in Demerara (now Guyana), rumors spread among the slaves that the king had already freed them. Led by black deacons of the church of young John Smith, a sympathetic white Protestant missionary who was secretly teaching slave children to read, the slaves demanded to speak with the governor. They told him that “God had made them of the same flesh and blood as the whites, and that they were tired of being Slaves to them, that their good King had sent orders they should be free and they would not work anymore.”

  What began with words ended in bloodshed. Thousands of slaves revolted. By the time the uprising was quashed, government troops had killed 250 slaves and imprisoned Smith on charges of inciting the rebellion, which he almost certainly did not do. From his damp prison cell he smuggled out these verses from the Bible: “We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed.” He had been sentenced to be hanged. Authorities in London relented, but by the time word of reprieve reached Demerara it was too late – he had died of tuberculosis. His story was covered widely in the British press, and public sympathy for him increased the support for ending slavery.

  In Jamaica, as in Demerara, the slaves’ hopes rose when they heard rumors that the king had freed them. When Christmas 1831 fell on a Sunday and the planters refused them an extra day off work, the slaves were furious. Samuel Sharpe, a slave preacher, traveled the island to organize resistance against the planters, who he said were standing in the way of their freedom. He was most likely trying to organize a strike for paid labor, but the result was a rebellion that involved between twenty thousand and thirty thousand slaves. The white death toll was remarkably low – only fourteen men – but more than two hundred plantations were torched. The government responded swiftly and harshly. Two hundred rebels were killed and more than three hundred were executed later, including Samuel Sharpe.

  Said an eyewitness to Sharpe’s hanging, “He marched to the spot … with a firm and even dignified step, clothed in a suit of new white clothes, made for him by some female members of the family of his owner, with all of whom he was a favorite, and who deeply regretted his untimely end.” To this day, Jamaicans remember his last words: “I would rather die upon yonder gallows than live in slavery.”

  Jamaican colonists blamed missionaries for the rebellion, and churchmen had to flee in fear to Britain. There, their stories of white brutality toward slaves turned public opinion further against slavery and its supporters. British officials predicted more uprisings. As a vice admiral explained to a parliamentary committee, “The only reason why [the slaves] are tranquil now is, that they … hope to be emancipated.” If they were not, he warned, “insurrection will soon take place.”

  A SINGULAR EVENT IN HISTORY

  Why did the abolition movement begin in Britain, and why did it succeed?

  Historians are not sure, but they point out that abolition movements happened only in Western cultures – in Britain, the United States, and Europe. Asia, Africa, and the Middle East have never produced mass movements to end slavery.

  Two forces in the West encouraged people to question slavery.

  The first was religion. Western civilization is rooted in the Jewish and Christian Bibles. Although many slave owners found words in the Bible that seemed to allow slavery, the abolitionists focused on the Bible’s story of a God who sides with slaves against their oppressors.

  The second was an eighteenth-century movement called the Enlightenment. Philosophers like John Locke in England and Montesquieu in France taught an idea that was radical for their time: all people are born free and equal and share the same basic human rights. Abolitionists were influenced by this view, and used it to fight anyone who believed that a person could own another human being.

  “The Monster Is Dead!”

  By 1830 there were 1,200 local antislavery groups in Britain, demanding immediate emancipation of slaves. But Parliament was still run by the rich and titled, many of whom got their wealth through slave labor. Only a small percentage of Englishmen were allowed to vote; a city as large and rich (and pro-abolition) as Manchester had no MPs at all. A bill that would allow more Englishmen to vote was introduced in 1831, but the House of Lords voted it down. The public became angrier, and it began to dawn on the government that they could face a rebellion if they did not pass a reform bill soon. They did so in 1832, and many antislavery members were elected.

  In 1833 the new Parliament met, and the antislavery forces led an orderly demonstration down to the prime minister’s office on Downing Street. Finally, in the summer of 1833, an emancipation bill passed both houses.

  It did not free the slaves immediately. Instead, emancipation would come in two stages. First, slaves would become “apprentices,” doing full-time unpaid work for their owners for six years. Only then would they be free. This was not popular among the antislavery activists, and one extraordinary petition against the delay arrived in Parliament with the signatures of more than half a million women. In the West Indies, slaves went on strike. Finally the “apprenticeship” period was shortened to four years. On August 1, 1838, almost 800,000 slaves throughout the British Caribbean were freed.

  In one Jamaican church, on the night before, the slaves held a ceremony. They had hung the walls with garlands of flowers and portraits of Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce. In the churchyard was a coffin labeled “Colonial Slavery, died July 31st, 1838, aged 276 years.” In the coffin they placed an iron punishment collar, a whip, and chains.

  At midnight, their minister cried, “The monster is dead!”

  And so it was – in the British West Indies.

  CHAPTER 9

  IN THE LAND OF LIBERTY: NORTH AMERICA

  One July 4 in the early 1800s, cannon blasts woke Charles Ball in Columbia, South Carolina. Fifes and drums played all morning, and at noon several hundred people sat down at a long table to eat, drink, and sing songs in honor of liberty. It was America’s Independence Day.

  All day Ball heard speakers praise the nation. One speaker said that it was a “principle of our free government that all men were born free and equal.” But Ball knew the words did not apply to him. He was a slave and on this Independence Day he was about to be put on the auction block, where he would be sold to a cotton planter. He would be forced to pick cotton, as millions of other slaves did.

  For over 250 years, slaves born in Africa, and their American-born children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, worked at many kinds of labor. From as far north as Quebec to the southern tip of Florida, their backbreaking work built new lands and made many people rich by their skill, their talent, and their sweat.

  As Europeans began to settle in the New World, it seemed that there were never enough hands to clear the land of trees, to plant and harvest, or to do the time-consuming and difficult household work. Skilled blacksmiths and carpenters, to manufacture everything from nails to ships, were in short supply.

  Many Europeans who could not find jobs at home came to North America as indentured servants, bound to their employers for a certain number of years. Some were promised a little money or land at the end of their contracts, but most received only free transportation across the sea. Their lives were far from easy, and some were sold to strangers who bought their contracts. But at least they knew they would be freed when their term of service ended.

  Some Africans were among those indentured servants, but most arrived as chattel slaves, the property of their masters for life. They could be sold or passed from one generation to another. They would never be free again.

  Slaves and their owners often worked side by side, and some owners, like the Bennett family in Virginia, even helped their slaves gain freedom. The Bennetts bought Anthony Johnson, identified in official documents as “Antonio a Negro,” in Jamestown in 1621. While he was still a slave, they let him keep his own farm and cattle, marry, and baptize his children. When Johnson became free, he became a slav
e owner himself, and his slave, John Casar, also owned cattle. However, Johnson did not treat Casar as generously as the Bennetts had treated him. When Casar asked for his freedom, Johnson said no.

  In those early years, black slaves and black and white indentured servants all worked and socialized together, sometimes along with their owners. But not everybody approved. A white widow traveling through Connecticut in 1704 wrote disapprovingly in her diary that farmers were too “familiar” with their slaves. Some let their slaves sit at the “table and eat with them (as they say to save time) and into the dish goes the black hoof as freely as the white hand,” she wrote. Her obnoxious view would become all too common among whites as the years went by.

  Indentured servitude began to die out in the mid-eighteenth century, and slavery became the usual practice. As early as 1688, Quakers met in Germantown, Pennsylvania, where they held the first public protest against slavery. But most white Americans saw slavery as a normal part of life, and the demand for slaves remained high.

  The first African slaves arrived in America in 1619 on a Dutch warship. A Virginia colonist wrote to London that the ship was in desperate need of supplies, and had nothing to sell “but 20 and odd Negroes” that the governor and merchant bought in exchange for food.

  Photo Credit 9.1

  Snatched from Home

  Six-year-old Broteer, the son of a prince of the West African Dukandarra people, was hiding in tall reeds with his mother when enemy warriors from another African state arrived. They had already threatened to attack the Dukandarra unless they were given cattle and money, and Broteer’s father had agreed. But the invaders had no intention of sticking to the bargain. Broteer watched his father try in vain to fight them off. The memory of what happened next was still vivid to him in 1793, when he was nearly seventy years old.

  The very first salute I had from them was a violent blow on the head with the fore part of a gun, and at the same time a grasp round the neck. I then had a rope put about my neck, as had all the women in the thicket with me, and [we] were immediately led to my father, who was likewise pinioned and haltered for leading.

  Bound and helpless, the captives were forced to carry heavy loads – Broteer’s was a grindstone he carried on his head – and to follow the enemy army. At their first stop, the warriors stabbed and beat Broteer’s father to death as the boy watched in helpless horror.

  Finally they came to a castle on the west coast, possibly Cape Coast Castle in today’s Ghana. This was no stately, beautiful castle; slave castles were bleak, dreary, and terrifying. The captives were locked in cold, dark dungeons, sometimes for months, until ships arrived to take them to their new lives as slaves.

  Although borders have changed over the years, Broteer’s home was probably in what is now Mali. If so, the small child’s long, hard march would have totaled about six hundred miles (almost 1,000 km), with that heavy weight on his head.

  The slave traders put Broteer on a ship bound for Rhode Island, a British colony that later became one of the original thirteen states of the United States. Robert Mumford, the ship’s steward, paid a trader four gallons of rum and a piece of calico cloth for the child, renamed him Venture, and took him home to New York.

  Venture began a life of unceasing toil. At the age of nine he had to pound a great pile of corn each night to feed the poultry the next day. If he didn’t produce enough, he was “vigorously punished,” he later said.

  NEW HOME, NEW NAME

  Owners considered it their right to name their slaves. The name might sound mighty, like “Hercules,” the Greek hero, or silly, like “Jumper.” Either way, it was humiliating. There was little point in objecting, but an occasional slave did.

  Lazarus La Baron already owned three slaves, Pompey, Phyllis, and Prince, when he bought Quasho. La Baron tried naming him Julius Caesar, but no matter how often his owner whipped him, starved him, or tried to bribe him, his new slave would not answer to any name but Quasho. La Baron finally let him keep his name.

  William Wells Brown did not get his name back until he ran away. When he was a slave his master’s nephew, also named William, arrived to live with the family. His master decided that a slave couldn’t have the same name as a member of his family, and ordered Brown’s mother to rename him. Brown later wrote, “This, at the time, I thought to be one of the most cruel acts that could be committed upon my rights; and I received several very severe whippings for telling people that my name was William, after orders were given to change it.” For years he was known as Sandford. When he escaped, he took back his name and added “Wells Brown” to honor a man who had helped him flee.

  Slaving Indoors and Out

  Venture’s hard life was typical. Everywhere, slaves cooked, cleaned, mended clothes, and toted water long distances from a river or a well. But most slaves worked the land. They chopped wood, cleared fields, planted crops, and did many of the tasks needed to grow rice, indigo, tobacco, and later cotton.

  At first, southern planters had little success farming rice, but they discovered that slaves from the rice-growing regions of Africa like the Gold Coast or Gambia knew how to produce good crops. The Africans’ know-how was so valuable to the planters that demand for slaves skyrocketed, and by 1720 the vast majority of people living in South Carolina were slaves. They brought with them not only planting techniques but also familiarity with tools like the fanner basket, which simplified the job of removing the husk from the rice kernel.

  After he was free, Venture gave himself the last name “Smith.” That name and his history appear on his gravestone, a stop along a historic route in Connecticut known as the Freedom Trail. It says Smith was the son of a king and was “kidnapped and sold as a slave but by his own industry he acquired money to purchase his freedom.”

  Photo Credit 9.2

  Thanks to the slaves’ knowledge and skills, Americans developed a taste for rice – which they still have today – and their owners became rich. A European visitor left a record of the terrible things she witnessed. “There is no living near [the rice fields] with the putrid water that must lie on it, and the labour required for it is only fit for slaves, and I think the hardest work I have seen them engaged in,” she wrote. She was right. Rice cultivation was grueling. Slaves began sowing in April, and throughout the scorching hot summer months they stood barefoot and hatless in water-soaked rice fields infested with snakes, alligators, and disease-carrying mosquitoes.

  Each workday was long, although rice planters began to use the “task system,” letting slaves stop work when their tasks were done. The rest of their time was their own. Slaves could use the precious bits of time to grow their own crops or make goods they could sell. But the task system did not guarantee a short workday. Often, after a full day in the fields, slaves (usually women) still had to shake the rice in the fanner baskets to remove the husks.

  Even after the harvest, work went on. Slaves spent all winter preparing the fields for the next year’s crop. A visitor to South Carolina wrote, “The cultivation of rice was described to me as by far the most unhealthy work in which the slaves were employed; and, in spite of every care, … they sank under it in great numbers.” It is hard to imagine what he meant by “every care.” Work in the rice fields was a job no white person would want, and no black either, but the slaves had no choice.

  Early Resistance

  For slaves who found the rare chance to escape, the swamps and forests of South Carolina offered so many hiding places that runaways were able to form maroon communities, as they had in Surinam and Jamaica. Whenever they could, plantation slaves helped them by smuggling out tools and clothing, and the runaways hunted, fished, and grew their own food. Other runaways found welcome among Native Americans. For example, the family of Anthony Johnson – that Virginia ex-slave who refused to free his own slave – eventually lived with the Nanticoke people.

  The slaveholders’ greatest dread was slave rebellion, and that came to pass in South Carolina in 1739. Twenty slaves broke into a
store near the Stono River, southwest of Charleston. Under the leadership of a slave named Jemmy, they killed two shopkeepers, stole weapons, and burned plantations, all the while beating drums, flying a banner, and shouting, “Liberty!” Their plan was to flee South Carolina and gain freedom in Florida, which was still Spanish territory. The group gathered more recruits and killed more whites along the way. Many of the rebels had been soldiers in Africa before they were captured and brought to South Carolina. They knew how to fight.

  Armed planters caught most of the rebels within a week, although some managed to escape to Florida. But the end of the revolt did not ease the whites’ minds. They feared that more rebellions would come, and they were right.

  This newspaper advertisement from about 1780 announced that 250 slaves from the Windward and Rice coasts would be sold aboard the ship Bance Island. By insisting that they took the “utmost care” to keep the “Negroes” free of smallpox, the traders hoped to charge a higher price. Photo Credit 9.3

  Just two years after the Stono Rebellion, a group of slaves and whites was suspected of planning a revolt in New York. They were tried for conspiracy. At the trial, they spoke about their desire simply to take a walk, dance, and go out with their friends. They did not win over the jury. Four whites and at least sixteen blacks were hanged, thirteen slaves were burned alive, and seventy were sold into slavery in the Caribbean. The government took steps to prevent further revolts. Slaves had been meeting their friends at night or at public water pumps, but New York passed a law that limited their travel. Visits to friends or family were also forbidden.