Five Thousand Years of Slavery

by Marjorie Gann

  Harriet Tubman was so notorious among slave owners for successfully escorting slaves to freedom – she freed over three hundred – that there was a $40,000 reward for her capture. “I never ran my train off the track,” she proudly told an interviewer, “and I never lost a passenger.”

  Photo Credit 10.6

  Again and again she returned south, making a total of nineteen trips by 1860. Tubman would try to leave on a Saturday night, knowing that owners couldn’t advertise in the newspapers for any missing slaves until Monday. She even managed to lead a group of eleven people, including her brother and his wife, from Maryland to Canada. She found clever ways to conceal her identity. Once, disguised as a frail old woman, she heard some men reading her “wanted” poster, which said she was illiterate. She quickly buried her nose in a book.

  During the Civil War, Tubman worked for the North as a cook, nurse, and guide, and she was the first woman to lead a raid, liberating more than seven hundred slaves along a river in South Carolina. To encourage them to escape, she stood on the deck of a gunboat singing, “Come along! Come along! Don’t be alarmed / Uncle Sam is rich enough to give you all a farm.”

  The Dred Scott Case

  Dred Scott was a slave in St. Louis, Missouri, when his owner took him to the free state of Illinois and then to Wisconsin, a free territory, before they returned to Missouri. While they were in Wisconsin, Scott met and married Harriet Robinson, who became the property of Scott’s owner. When the owner died in 1843, Scott and Harriet became the widow’s slaves. Three years later, the Scotts went to court to win their freedom. Lawyers for the Scotts argued that they were free because they had lived on free land. The St. Louis circuit court agreed with them, but their owner appealed the decision. In 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court heard Dred Scott’s case and ruled against him in a 7–2 decision that many legal experts today consider one of the high court’s worst judgments.

  Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, a Southern slaveholder, based his decision on racism. Because Scott was black, Taney said, he was not a citizen and had no right to sue. Blacks were “beings of an inferior order … so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Scott was property, every citizen had a right to transport property, and that included slaves. Taney also said that Congress could not pass laws to keep slavery out of free territories like Wisconsin. The decision caused joy in the South and fury in the North.

  The Battle Begins

  Tensions between North and South were growing. In 1854, Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which let the people who had settled those two territories (not yet states) decide by vote whether the lands would be slave or free. That law provoked armed skirmishes in Kansas between free-soilers, who opposed slavery and had moved to Kansas from the North, and Southerners, who had settled there with their slaves. On the antislavery side was the gray-bearded abolitionist John Brown, a deeply religious man who believed the Bible called on him to take bold action against the sin of American slavery. With his five sons, he freed some slaves, but also gained a reputation for brutality after executing five proslavery settlers. The fighting in Kansas did not resolve the slavery question, and Brown spent the next few years traveling the country to convince supporters that only a violent uprising could end slavery.

  The target he chose to begin the battle was the federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now in West Virginia), where weapons and ammunition were stored. His plan was to steal the weapons, free and arm slaves, march toward the mountains, and ignite a general slave revolt that he thought would spread throughout the country.

  On the night of October 16, 1859, Brown and a band of twelve white and five black men, armed with a rifle and two pistols each, crossed the railroad bridge leading to the armory. The raiders holed up in the armory overnight, but locals soon discovered them and sounded the alarm. Federal troops arrived to find a drunken mob besieging the raiders. Two of Brown’s sons were dead, five of his men had escaped, others were wounded, and seven were taken prisoner, including Brown.

  Two of the blacks in the raid were tried and executed. One of them, John Anthony Copeland, wrote to his parents from his jail cell, asking them to “remember that it was a ‘Holy Cause,’ … remember that if I must die I die in trying to liberate a few of my poor and oppressed people from my condition of servitude.”

  Brown faced trial on the charge of treason against the State of Virginia, and against the advice of his attorney he refused to defend himself on the grounds of insanity. He believed that he had waged a “holy war,” and that his hanging would further the crusade against slavery.

  Although anti-violence abolitionists did not wholeheartedly support Brown, they considered him a martyr. Garrison’s Liberator labeled the raid “misguided, wild, and apparently insane,” but even Garrison praised Brown: “I am prepared to say, ‘Success to every slave insurrection at the South,’ ” and “I see in every slave on the Southern plantation a living John Brown.” Blacks embraced John Brown as a hero. On the day of his execution, three thousand gathered in Boston in his honor, and in Detroit the Brown Liberty Singers sang “Ode to Old Capt. John Brown.”

  Brown himself had predicted that his death would not spell victory for his executioners. Before his hanging, he wrote, “The crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away; but with Blood.”

  John Brown’s raid on the Harpers Ferry armory terrified Southerners, who feared that the abolitionists were planning to invade the South. This print shows Brown holding hostages inside the fire-engine house, just before the gate was broken down and Brown was captured.

  Photo Credit 10.7

  A New President

  In 1860, candidates for the nation’s highest office battled over the issue of slavery for months. Abraham Lincoln, the Republican candidate, had spoken out against slavery years earlier, saying that it violated a leading principle of the Declaration of Independence. But he knew that he would not be elected president if he called for an end to slavery. Instead, he just opposed expanding slavery beyond the boundaries of the current slave states.

  Lincoln won the election, and on March 4, 1861, he was sworn in as president of the United States. By then, seven Southern states had already withdrawn from the country and formed the Confederate States of America. Their constitution protected slaveholders’ rights and emphasized that slaveholders could move slaves to any states or territories. Four more states would later join the Confederacy.

  Lincoln considered himself to be president of the entire country, slave states and free. In his inaugural address, he said he had no intention of interfering “with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists.” His primary goal was to hold the country together.

  Southerners didn’t trust Lincoln. Six weeks later, on April 12, 1861, Confederate forces fired on the federal Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, and the Civil War began.

  Blacks in the American Civil War

  As they had in the War of Independence and the War of 1812, blacks joined the fight. They knew that if Confederate (Rebel) forces caught them they faced punishment, and that freed blacks among them might be re-enslaved, yet they were willing to take that risk.

  The slave Robert Smalls was pilot of a steam-powered vessel, the Planter, in Charleston Harbor. The ship served as a cotton boat in peacetime, but during the war the South put it to work as a gunboat. On May 12, 1862, the Planter was loaded with weapons for two Rebel forts. That night, after the white crew members went home, Smalls and the other slaves cleaned the ship, as usual. Their families often brought dinner to them on board, so the deck patrol asked no questions when they arrived. Around three in the morning, Smalls gave the order for the ship to leave port, and slowly it steamed into the harbor. The Confederate flag was flying, and the ship sounded the correct signal – two long pulls and a jerk at the whistle cord – as it moved past Fort Sumter. But as the Planter approached the Northern (Union) blockade, the crew pulled down the Rebel colors and raised a white flag, a sign of surre
nder. Smalls and his crew not only delivered a valuable vessel with heavy weaponry to the Union, but knowledge of Confederate defenses and waterways. He went on to enlist in the U.S. Navy and become a captain.

  Smalls was far from the only slave who faced danger for the Union cause. William A. Jackson was a house servant and coachman for Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy. Whites had the habit of speaking freely in front of their slaves, assuming they would not understand what was said. Jackson did. On May 3, 1862, he crossed into Union lines near Fredericksburg, Virginia, to report a discussion Davis had had with his military leadership. The information was important enough that the Union general immediately telegraphed it to the War Department. No one today knows the details, but one officer credited “Jeff Davis’ coachman” in a letter he sent to the Secretary of War. Even Confederate General Robert E. Lee wrote, “The chief source of information to the enemy is through our negroes.”

  Since the start of the war, blacks had served in the U.S. Navy, but Lincoln hesitated to enlist black foot soldiers into the Union army. He was afraid that if he did so, he would anger border states like Maryland, which still allowed slavery but remained loyal to the Union. This changed in July 1862. The Union army was taking a beating, and Congress realized that it needed black soldiers.

  In 1862, Congress finally authorized the Union army to recruit black soldiers. The War Department promised they would be treated the same as whites, but the promise was not kept.

  Photo Credit 10.8

  Free at Last

  On September 22, 1862, Lincoln announced that on the first day of the next year he would issue a proclamation to free all the slaves in the Rebel states. January 1 was traditionally the day when slaves were sold, but on New Year’s Day in 1863, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation immediately freed thousands.

  Anna Woods, a slave in Texas, remembered that soldiers came to the fields one Monday morning to tell the slaves the news. “They come a-shouting,” she said. “I remember one woman. She jumped on a barrel and she shouted. She jumped off and she shouted.… She jumped back on again and shouted some more. She kept that up for a long time, just jumping on a barrel and back off again.”

  Early in the war, Frederick Douglass had been outraged with Lincoln when the president refused to make freeing the slaves the goal of the war. But in 1863, after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation and authorized black enlistment, Douglass and Lincoln met. Douglass saw in Lincoln “a deeper moral conviction against slavery than I had ever seen before in anything spoken or written by him.”

  Lincoln took another big step toward advancing freedom on November 19, 1863, when he spoke on the battlefield in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The event was to honor soldiers who had died four months earlier in the bloodiest battle of the Civil War. Lincoln spoke for just three minutes, but his short speech changed the idea of the war from one of preserving the Union to one of freedom for all people.

  Lincoln began by saying, “Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” He used the Founders’ words about equality in a way that the Founders had not. He used them to call for freedom for all people, and said equality was the ideal for which the men on the battlefield “gave their last full measure of devotion.” After that, people in the North and in the South, both blacks and whites, viewed the war as a battle over slavery.

  On April 9, 1865, the Civil War ended in victory for the North. Days later, on April 14, Lincoln was assassinated by an actor, John Wilkes Booth, in revenge for the South’s defeat. A few months later, Douglass received a parcel in the mail. It was from Lincoln’s widow, Mary Todd Lincoln, and contained Lincoln’s “favorite walking staff.” She was distributing mementos to people she knew her husband had honored, and Douglass, whom he had called “my friend Douglass” at his second inaugural reception, was one of these. Thanking the First Lady, Frederick Douglass wrote that “this inestimable memento of his Excellency will be retained in my possession while I live – an object of sacred interest … as an indication of his humane interest in the welfare of my whole race.”

  Douglass later wrote that Lincoln “was one of the very few Americans, who could entertain a Negro and converse with him without in anywise reminding him of the unpopularity of his color.” He was, said Douglass, “the black man’s President: the first to show any respect for their rights as men.”

  The official end to slavery came on December 6, 1865, when Congress put into law the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. It prohibits slavery and involuntary servitude except as punishment for a crime.

  After the War

  The end of the war did not end prejudice against blacks or bring prosperity to the former slaves or their descendants. Well into the 1940s, laws in the South that prohibited “loitering” (standing around or walking slowly) allowed white law officers to arrest and charge blacks for trivial reasons. When they could not pay the fines, the courts sent them to work for whites as forced laborers on roads, in coal mines, in lumber camps, and on plantations. Many of them died without being able to get word to their families.

  The army did not fully integrate until after World War II, and it took a persistent civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s to eliminate the obstacles that black Americans faced in education, employment, housing, and voting. Improvements came with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Many Americans were skeptical in 2007, when Barack Obama, a black man, announced his candidacy for the presidency. But on November 4, 2008, he was elected president of the United States.

  CHAPTER 11

  BLACKBIRDERS, COOLIES, AND SLAVE GIRLS: ASIA AND THE SOUTHERN PACIFIC

  The region of Asia and the Southern Pacific encompasses a vast area with people of many religions, cultures, and histories. Over land and by sea, slaves have been captured, ransomed, and traded, and over time, various patterns of slavery have developed.

  India

  Buddhism and Hinduism are ancient religions with followers all over the world. They are rooted in India, where slavery was a part of life for people of both faiths for thousands of years.

  Buddha, who founded Buddhism in the sixth to fifth centuries BCE, taught that being a slave was one of the most painful miseries a person could experience. He cautioned his followers not to live off money earned in the slave trade, and told them to treat their slaves humanely, assign them work they could manage, give them an occasional holiday, feed them, pay them, and care for them when they were ill. The reward for this would be loyal workers. But his teachings did not question the idea of slavery.

  Early Buddhist writings offer a glimpse of the lives of slaves, often a grim mixture of ill treatment, long hours, and hard work. One story describes the life of Punika, a slave girl who fetched water from the break of dawn until nightfall, even in the freezing winter months. Though her master was a devout Buddhist, he did nothing to lighten her burden. In another tale, Rajjumala’s mistress liked to catch hold of the girl’s hair as a convenient handle when she wanted to slap or kick her. In self-defense, the slave had someone shave her head. That made her mistress so angry that she tied a rope around the girl’s head and beat her savagely. The slave managed to escape, but in such despair that she tried to take her own life.

  In the sacred book Dialogues of the Buddha, a slave compares himself with a king:

  He is a man and so am I. But the king lives in the full enjoyment of the five pleasures of the senses – a very god methinks – and here am I a slave, working for him, rising before him and retiring later to rest, keen to carry out his pleasure, anxious to make myself agreeable in deed and word, watching his very looks.

  Life as a slave among Hindus was not much different. Kali, a slave in a Hindu household, thought her mistress did not deserve her reputation for having a gentle temper. She asked herself, “Now, does my mistress have an inward ill temper that she does not s
how because I do my work so carefully?” She set out to test her. Three mornings in a row, Kali slept late. Her mistress’s patience began to fray. She called Kali a “wicked slave,” scowled, and on the third morning challenged the girl – “Well now, Kali, why did you get up late today?”

  “That’s nothing, mistress,” replied Kali carelessly.

  Angered by her slave’s sauciness, her mistress grabbed a doorbolt and hit Kali on the head. Kali marched off, exposing her bloodied head – and her mistress’s ill temper – to the neighbors.

  In India there were degrees of slavery. People in debt bondage sold themselves to a landowner who settled their debts, like back taxes or fines, in exchange for their labor. Those in debt bondage could not be punished physically, and the women could not be abused sexually. Not so, permanent slaves. They were of a lower rank, and were assigned “impure” work like handling leftover food, animal dung, or corpses.

  Even though Hindu and Buddhist religious scriptures told people not to buy and sell human beings, slaves from local tribal groups worked on large estates in the fertile river valleys of southern India and were traded from ports along the Malabar Coast, India’s western shore. This slave trade persisted well into modern times.

  Islamic armies invaded India in the eighth century CE, bringing with them African slaves, mostly from Ethiopia, as well as a new religion. Muslim rulers continued to import Africans for centuries, prizing them as soldiers and excellent sailors who protected ships against pirates on the Indian Ocean. Freed Africans even established kingdoms in western India, and could rise to positions of high authority.