Slave Narratives

by William L. Andrews

  A multitude of facts, illustrating the position that slaveholders treat their slaves worse than they do their cattle, will occur to all who are familiar with slavery. When cattle break through their owners’ inclosures and escape, if found, they are driven back and fastened in again; and even slaveholders would execrate as a wretch, the man who should tie them up, and bruise and lacerate them for straying away; but when slaves that have escaped are caught, they are flogged with the most terrible severity. When herds of cattle are driven to market, they are suffered to go in the easiest way, each by himself; but when slaves are driven to market, they are fastened together with handcuffs, galled by iron collars and chains, and thus forced to travel on foot hundreds of miles, sleeping at night in their chains. Sheep, and sometimes horned cattle, are marked with their owners’ initials—but this is generally done with paint, and of course produces no pain. Slaves, too, are often marked with their owners’ initials, but the letters are stamped into their flesh with a hot iron. Cattle are suffered to graze their pastures without stint; but the slaves are restrained in their food to a fixed allowance. The slaveholders’ horses are notoriously far better fed, more moderately worked, have fewer hours of labor, and longer intervals of rest, than their slaves; and their valuable horses are far more comfortably housed and lodged, and their stables more effectually defended from the weather, than the slaves’ huts.

  These objectors can really believe the fact, that in the city of New York, less than a hundred years since, thirteen persons were publicly burned to death, over a slow fire: and that the legislature of the same State took under its paternal care the African slave-trade, and declared that ‘all encouragement should be given to the direct importation of slaves; that all smuggling of slaves should be condemned, as an eminent discouragement to the fair trader.’

  They do not call in question the fact that the African slave-trade was carried on from the ports of the free States till within thirty years; that even members of the Society of Friends were actively engaged in it, shortly before the revolutionary war;* that as late as 1807, no less than fifty-nine of the vessels engaged in that trade were sent out from the little State of Rhode Island, which had then only about seventy thousand inhabitants; that among those most largely engaged in those foul crimes, are the men whom the people of Rhode Island delight to honor: that the man who dipped most deeply in that trade of blood, (James De Wolf,) and amassed a most princely fortune by it, was not long since their Senator in Congress; and another, who was captain of one of his vessels, was recently Lieutenant Governor of the State.

  They can believe, too, all the horrors of the middle passage, the chains, suffocation, maimings, stranglings, starvation, and cold-blooded murders, atrocities perpetrated on board these slave-ships by their own citizens, perhaps by their own townsmen and neighbors—possibly by their own fathers: but, O! they ‘can’t believe that the slaveholders can be so hard-hearted towards their slaves as to treat them with great cruelty.’ They can believe that His Holiness the Pope, with his cardinals, bishops and priests, have tortured, broken on the wheel, and burned to death thousands of Protestants— that eighty thousand of the Anabaptists were slaughtered in Germany—that hundreds of thousands of the blameless Waldenses, Huguenots and Lollards, were torn in pieces by the most titled dignitaries of church and state, and that almost every professedly Christian sect has, at some period of its history, persecuted unto blood those who dissented from their creed. They can believe, also, that in Boston, New York, Utica, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Alton, and scores of other cities and villages of the free States, ‘gentlemen of property and standing,’ led on by civil officers, by members of State legislatures, and of Congress, by judges and attorneys-general, by editors of newspapers, and by professed ministers of the gospel, have organized mobs, broken up lawful meetings of peaceable citizens, committed assault and battery upon their persons, knocked them down with stones, led them about with ropes, dragged them from their beds at midnight, gagged and forced them into vehicles, and driven them into unfrequented places, and there tormented and disfigured them—that they have rifled their houses, made bonfires of their furniture in the streets, burned to the ground, or torn in pieces the halls or churches in which they were assembled—attacked them with deadly weapons, stabbed some, shot others, and killed one. They can believe all this—and further, that a majority of the citizens in the places where these outrages have been committed, connived at them; and by refusing to indict the perpetrators, or, if they were indicted, by combining to secure their acquittal, and rejoicing in it, have publicly adopted these felonies as their own. All these things they can believe without hesitation, and that they have been been done by their own acquaintances, neighbors, relatives; perhaps those with whom they interchange courtesies, those for whom they vote, or to whose salaries they contribute—but yet, O! they can never believe that slaveholders inflict cruelties upon their slaves!

  They can give full credence to the kidnapping, imprisonment, and deliberate murder of WILLIAM MORGAN, and that by men of high standing in society; they can believe that this deed was aided and abetted, and the murderers screened from justice, by a large number of influential persons, who were virtually accomplices, either before or after the fact; and that this combination was so effectual, as successfully to defy and triumph over the combined powers of the government;—yet that those who constantly rob men of their time, liberty and wages, and all their rights, should rob them of bits of flesh, and occasionally of a tooth, make their backs bleed, and put fetters on their legs, is too monstrous to be credited! Further, these same persons, who ‘can’t believe’ that slaveholders are so iron-hearted as to ill-treat their slaves, believe that the very elite of these slaveholders, those most highly esteemed and honored among them, are continually daring each other to mortal conflict, and in the presence of mutual friends, taking deadly aim at each other’s hearts, with settled purpose to kill, if possible. That among the most distinguished Governors of slave States, among their most celebrated judges, senators, and representatives in Congress, there is hardly one who has not either killed, or tried to kill, or aided and abetted his friends in trying to kill, one or more individuals. That pistols, dirks, bowie-knives, or other instruments of death, are generally carried throughout the slave States—and that deadly affrays with them, in the streets of their cities and villages, are matters of daily occurrence; that the sons of slaveholders in southern colleges bully, threaten, and fire upon their teachers, and their teachers upon them; that, during the last summer, in the most celebrated seat of science and literature in the South, the University of Virginia, the professors were attacked by more than seventy armed students, and, in the words of a Virginia paper, were obliged ‘to conceal themselves from their fury;’ also, that almost all the riots and violence that occur in northern colleges are produced by the turbulence and lawless passions of southern students. That such are the furious passions of slaveholders, no considerations of personal respect, none for the proprieties of life, none for the honor of our national legislature, none for the character of our country abroad, can restrain the slaveholding members of Congress from the most disgraceful personal encounters on the floor of our nation’s legislature—smiting their fists in each other’s faces, throttling, and even kicking and trying to gouge each other; that, during the session of the Congress just closed, no less than six slaveholders, taking fire at words spoken in debate, have either rushed at each other’s throats, or kicked, or struck, or attempted to knock each other down; and that in all these instances, they would doubtless have killed each other, if their friends had not separated them. Further, they know full well, these were not insignificant, vulgar blackguards, elected because they were the head bullies and bottle-holders in a boxing ring, or because their constituents went drunk to the ballot-box; but they were some of the most conspicuous members of the House—one of them a former Speaker.

  Our newspapers are full of these and similar daily occurrences among slaveholders, copied verbatim
from their own accounts of them in their own papers, and all this we fully credit; no man is simpleton enough to cry out, ‘O, I can’t believe that slaveholders do such things,’—and yet, when we turn to the treatment which these men mete out to their slaves, and show that they are in the habitual practice of striking, kicking, knocking down, and shooting them, as well as each other—the look of blank incredulity that comes over northern dough-faces is a study for a painter: and then the sentimental outcry, with eyes and hands uplifted, ‘Oh, indeed, I can’t believe the slaveholders are so cruel to their slaves.’ Most amiable and touching charity!

  Arbitrary power is to the mind what alcohol is to the body; it intoxicates. Man loves power. It is perhaps the strongest human passion; and the more absolute the power, the stronger the desire for it; and the more it is desired, the more its exercise is enjoyed: this enjoyment is to human nature a fearful temptation,—generally an overmatch for it. Hence it is true, with hardly an exception, that arbitrary power is abused in proportion as it is desired. The fact that a person intensely desires power over others, without restraint, shows the absolute necessity of restraint. What woman would marry a man who made it a condition that he should have the power to divorce her whenever he pleased? Oh! he might never wish to exercise it, but the power he would have! No woman, not stark mad, would trust her happiness in such hands.

  Would a father apprentice his son to a master, who insisted that his power over the lad should be absolute? The master might, perhaps, never wish to commit a battery upon the boy, but if he should, he insists upon having full swing! He who would leave his son in the clutches of such a wretch, would be bled and blistered for a lunatic as soon as his friends could get their hands upon him.

  The possession of power, even when greatly restrained, is such a fiery stimulant, that its lodgment in human hands is always perilous. Give men the handling of immense sums of money, and all the eyes of Argus and the hands of Briareus can hardly prevent embezzlement.

  That American slaveholders possess a power over their slaves which is virtually absolute, none will deny.* That they desire this absolute power, is shown from the fact of their holding and exercising it, and making laws to confirm and enlarge it. That the desire to possess this power, every tittle of it, is intense, is proved by the fact, that slaveholders cling to it with such obstinate tenacity, as well as by all their doings and sayings, their threats, cursings and gnashings against all who denounce the exercise of such power as usurpation and outrage, and counsel its immediate abrogation.

  From the nature of the case, from the laws of mind, such power, so intensely desired, griped with such a death-clutch, and with such fierce spurnings of all curtailment or restraint, cannot but be abused. Privations and inflictions must be its natural, habitual products, with ever and anon, terror, torture and despair, let loose to do their worst upon their helpless victims.

  Slaveholders organize themselves into a tribunal to adjudicate upon their own conduct, and give us, in their decisions, their estimate of their own character; informing us with characteristic modesty, that they have a high opinion of themselves; that in their own judgment, they are very mild, kind, and merciful gentlemen! In these conceptions of their own merits, and of the eminent propriety of their bearing towards their slaves,—slaveholders remind us of the Spaniard, who always took off his hat whenever he spoke of himself, and of the Governor of Schiraz, who, from a sense of justice to his own character, added to his other titles those of ‘Flower of Courtesy,’ ‘Nutmeg of Consolation,’ and ‘Rose of Delight.’

  When men speak of the treatment of others as being either good or bad, their declarations are not generally to be taken as testimony to matters of fact, so much as expressions of their own feelings towards those persons or classes who are the subjects of such treatment. If those persons are their fellow citizens; if they are in the same class of society with themselves; of the same language, creed, and color; similar in their habits, pursuits, and sympathies; they will keenly feel any wrong done to them, and denounce it as base, outrageous treatment; but let the same wrongs be done to persons of a condition in all respects the reverse, persons whom they habitually despise, and regard only in the light of mere conveniences, to be used for their pleasure, and the idea that such treatment is barbarous will be laughed at as ridiculous. When we hear slaveholders say that their slaves are well treated, we have only to remember that they are not speaking of persons, but of property; not of men and women, but of chattels and things; not of friends and associates, but of vassals and victims; not of those whom they respect and honor, but of those whom they scorn and trample on; not of those with whom they sympathize, and co-operate, and interchange courtesies, but of those whom they regard with contempt and aversion, and disdainfully set with the dogs of their flock. Reader, keep this fact in your mind, and you will have a clue to the slaveholder’s definition of ‘good treatment.’