We have dealt with the professed convictions of the Southern ministers as sincere convictions. We should be sorry to accuse any body of men professing to be teachers of the Christian religion of intentional insincerity, and although we can hardly conceive the possibility of men who base their religion upon the same Bible upon which we rest ours, attempting sincerely to justify slavery upon religious grounds, we would rather attribute the extraordinary moral obliquity which the attempt exhibits to the demoralising influence of the slave system than to actual hypocrisy. The spectacle of a crowd of learned and no doubt pious men standing forth as the avowed apologists of a system which deprives their fellow-men of all the rights of humanity is, perhaps, the most distressing evidence of its blighting and blinding influence which has yet been exhibited to the world. It ought to have its effect. As we have said, it is the duty of every man to study the lessons which this address of the Confederate clergy has for him. If his sympathy and influence be given to the Confederates, let him understand the nature of the cause he is aiding. Let him learn from the statement of the Confederates themselves that their cause is the cause of slavery, and that they look forward to the perpetuation and extension of slavery as the prize of success.
SLAVERY AND LIBERTY.
I’m on my way to Canada,
That dark and dreary land;
Oh! the dread effects of slavery
I can no longer stand.
My soul is vexed within me so
To think I am a slave,
Resolved I am to strike the blow,
For freedom or the grave.
CHORUS
Oh, Righteous Father!
Wilt thou not pity me,
And help me on to Canada,
Where coloured men are free.
I’ve served my master all my days,
Without one dimes’ reward,
And now I’m forced to run away,
To flee the lash and rod.
The hounds are baying on my track,
And master just behind,
Resolved that he will bring me back
Before I cross the line.
Old master went to preach one day,
Next day he looked for me;
I greased my heels and ran away,
For the land of liberty.
I dreamt I saw the British Queen
Majestic on the shore;
If e’er I reach old Canada,
I will come back no more.
I heard that Queen Victoria said,
If we would all forsake
Our native land of Slavery,
And come across the lake:
That she was standing on the shore
With arms extended wide,
To give us all a peaceful home
Beyond the swelling tide.
I heard old master pray one night,
That night he prayed for me,
That God would come with all his might,
From Satan set me free.
So I from Satan would escape
And flee the wrath to come,
If there’s a fiend in human shape,
Old master must be one.
CHRONOLOGY
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
NOTE ON THE TEXTS
NOTES
Chronology
1510
Spanish begin importation of African slaves into the Caribbean.
1619
Dutch traders sell 20 Africans into servitude at the English settlement at Jamestown, Virginia, beginning importation of slaves into the British colonies in North America.
1662
Virginia adopts law making children born to enslaved mothers slaves from birth. (Other colonies adopt similar laws during the late 17th and early 18th centuries as part of legal codes defining the status of slaves.)
1672
Royal African Company chartered by Charles II of England. Success of the company in the slave trade increases the number of slaves in British North American colonies as the number of white indentured servants declines.
1700
First American antislavery tract, The Selling of Joseph, published by Massachusetts judge Samuel Sewall.
1712
Eight whites and 25 blacks are killed in slave uprising in New York City.
1739
At least 30 whites and 44 blacks are killed during Stono slave rebellion in South Carolina.
1750
Estimated population of 13 British colonies is 236,000 blacks, almost all of them slaves, and 934,000 whites.
1772
Publication of the Narrative of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, the first English-language slave narrative.
1775
Beginning of Revolutionary War.
1776
Declaration of Independence adopted after Continental Congress deletes language in draft condemning the slave trade.
1777
Vermont adopts constitution prohibiting slavery.
1780
Pennsylvania adopts law providing for the gradual abolition of slavery.
1781–83
Judges and juries in several Massachusetts court cases find slavery to be incompatible with the state constitution adopted in 1780, which declared that all men “are born free and equal.” (No slaves are reported in Massachusetts in 1790 census.)
1783
Revolutionary War ends; at least 15,000 slaves leave the United States with the evacuating British forces.
1784
Connecticut and Rhode Island adopt laws for gradual emancipation of slaves.
1787
Continental Congress passes the Northwest Ordinance, which bans slavery in the territories north of the Ohio River. U.S. Constitution is framed; it counts slaves as three-fifths of free persons in apportioning representation and direct taxes, provides for the return of fugitive slaves, and forbids ending the importation of slaves before 1808.
1793
Congress passes Fugitive Slave Law, allowing slaveholders to use federal courts to regain possession of runaway slaves. Invention of the cotton gin leads to rapid expansion of cotton cultivation in the South.
1799
New York adopts law for the gradual emancipation of slaves.
1800
Gabriel Prosser and 35 followers are executed for plotting slave rebellion in Richmond, Virginia. United States census lists 108,395 free colored people, 893,041 slaves, and 4,304,489 whites.
1804
New Jersey adopts law for gradual emancipation of slaves.
1807
Congress bans importation of slaves into the United States, effective January 1, 1808. Britain abolishes slave trade throughout its empire and begins using its navy to suppress slave trading by other nations. (It is estimated that 10–11 million Africans were brought to the western hemisphere by the slave trade, of whom approximately 600,000 were landed in the British North American colonies and the United States; more than one million Africans died during the Atlantic passage.) Internal slave trade within the United States increases as large numbers of slaves are sent from tobacco-growing states of the upper South to cotton-growing states of the lower South.
1816
American Colonization Society formed to send free black Americans to Africa.
1820
Congress adopts Missouri Compromise, allowing the admission of Missouri as a slave state while prohibiting slavery in the remainder of the Louisiana Purchase north of latitude 36° 30′ N.
1822
Denmark Vesey and 35 other blacks are executed in Charleston, South Carolina, for plotting a slave revolt. Founding of colony (later named Liberia) on the West African coast for expatriated Americans of color.
1827
Final abolition of slavery in New York state.
1829
David Walker, a free black man living in Boston, publishes his Appeal . . . to the Colored Citizens of the World, a pamphlet in which he calls on blacks to forcibly overthrow slavery and racial oppression.
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1831
Slave rebellion led by Nat Turner in Southampton County, Virginia, ends with the deaths of 57 whites and at least 100 blacks; Turner and 19 followers are hanged.
1832
New England Anti-Slavery Society founded by William Lloyd Garrison to advocate the immediate abolition of slavery through nonviolent means and to oppose the colonization of free blacks.
1838
Final abolition of slavery in the British Caribbean.
1840
Liberty Party, first antislavery political party, founded in Albany, New York.
1845–48
Annexation of Texas and the Mexican War renew debate over the expansion of slavery.
1848
Abolition of slavery in the French Caribbean.
1850
Congress adopts series of measures regarding slavery (“Compromise of 1850”), including stronger Fugitive Slave Law that denies alleged fugitives any legal protections; law provokes widespread opposition and resistance in the free states. United States census lists 434,495 free colored people, 3,204,313 slaves, and 19,553,068 whites.
1852
Antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, written by Harriet Beecher Stowe in response to the Fugitive Slave Law, sells 300,000 copies in its first year of publication.
1854–56
Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 repeals Missouri Compromise and leads to fighting between pro- and antislavery factions in Kansas and the formation of Republican Party opposed to the further expansion of slavery.
1857
Supreme Court rules in Dred Scott decision that Congress cannot exclude slavery from the federal territories and that African Americans cannot be U.S. citizens, having “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
1859
John Brown seizes federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in an unsuccessful attempt to start slave uprising; 15 people are killed during the raid, and Brown is later hanged along with four other men.
1860
Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln is elected president November 6 on a platform opposing the extension of slavery. South Carolina secedes on December 20 (ten other states secede by May 1861).
1861
Confederates shell Fort Sumter, South Carolina, on April 12, beginning Civil War.
1862
Congress abolishes slavery in the District of Columbia and the federal territories and passes law freeing slaves who escape from the Confederacy, April–July. Lincoln issues preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, declaring that all slaves in Confederate-held territory will be freed on January 1, 1863.
1863
Emancipation Proclamation is issued on January 1, authorizing the enlistment of freed slaves; 180,000 black men (including free blacks from northern states) eventually serve in the Union army.
1865
Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery throughout the United States, is proposed to the states by Congress on January 31. Confederate armies surrender, April 9–May 26. Lincoln is assassinated on April 14. Ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment is completed December 6.
Biographical Notes
JAMES ALBERT UKAWSAW GRONNIOSAW (c. 1712–1775) Born in Bornu, near Lake Chad, Gronniosaw was sold into slavery while still a boy and taken on a Dutch ship from the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana) to Barbados. In Barbados he was sold to a master who took him to New York, where he worked as a kitchen servant. His second master, Theodorus Frelinghuysen, a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church, instructed him in Christianity, sent him to school, and manumitted him shortly before his own death c. 1748. Gronniosaw remained with Mrs. Frelinghuysen until her death two years later. After serving as a cook on board a privateer and as a soldier in the British army in Martinique in 1762, he went to England and then to Holland, where he worked as a butler and told his story to a convocation of Calvinist ministers. Returning to England after a year in Holland, Gronniosaw married a weaver and joined a Baptist congregation. He lived with his family in Colchester and Norwich before moving to Kidderminster, where he told his story to an unnamed amanuensis. A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Gronniosaw, an African Prince, as Related by Himself was published in 1772 and reprinted at least 12 times before 1800 in England, Ireland, and North America. Gronniosaw died in England.
OLAUDAH EQUIANO (c. 1745–March 31, 1797) By his own account born in the southeastern region of present-day Nigeria, Equiano grew up among the Ibo people before he was kidnapped at the age of 11 and sold into slavery. (Equiano’s 1759 baptismal record gives his birthplace as Carolina, and in a 1773 Royal Navy muster list it is recorded as South Carolina.) Sent to Barbados and then to Virginia, he was sold to Michael Henry Pascal, a lieutenant in the British navy, who renamed him Gustavus Vassa and took him to England as a servant. Baptized in 1759, Equiano spent most of his youth aboard ships of the Royal Navy. Expecting to be freed after six years of service, he was instead sold to a West Indian trader in 1762 and then to Robert King, a Philadelphia Quaker and merchant. In 1766 Equiano bought his freedom from King and returned to England the following year to work as a hairdresser and later as a sailor. During this time he learned the French horn, studied mathematics, and underwent a profound religious conversion to Methodism. After participating in an Arctic expedition and voyages to Central America and Turkey, Equiano settled in England in 1777. In 1786 he was appointed “commissary of provisions and stores” for a colonization venture in Sierra Leone, but his criticism of the leaders of the venture led to his dismissal before he could return to West Africa. His autobiography The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself was published in 1789; after its publication, Equiano traveled extensively in England, Scotland, and Ireland promoting the book and arranging for the publication of eight subsequent editions. He married Susanna Cullen, an Englishwoman, in 1792, and they had two daughters. Equiano died in London.
NAT TURNER (October 2, 1800–November 11, 1831) Born in Southampton County, Virginia, on the plantation of Benjamin Turner, the son of an African-born mother and a father who ran away during Turner’s childhood and was never retaken. Raised by his mother and grandmother, Turner learned to read and write before he began working in the cotton and tobacco fields. At the age of 21, he ran away for a month, then returned. In 1822 Benjamin Turner died and Turner was sold for $400 to Thomas Moore, a neighboring farmer. During the late 1820s Turner became convinced that he had been given a messianic task. In 1830 he became the slave of Joseph Travis, a wheelwright who had married Moore’s widow, Sally. After an eclipse of the sun in February 1831 Turner formed a small band of slaves to carry out a war against slaveholders. Intending to launch “the work of death” on July 4, 1831, Turner delayed the uprising for six weeks until he saw sunspots in mid-August. On the night of August 21, Turner and seven other slaves killed Travis and his family, and during the next 40 hours the insurrectionists killed more than 50 white men, women, and children, eventually growing to between 60 and 80 in number. Turner sought to capture weapons in Jerusalem, the county seat, but on August 23 the insurrectionists were scattered by white militia and Turner went into hiding. By the time of his capture on October 30 more than 100 African Americans, many of whom had no connection with the uprising, had been killed without trial, and another 19 had been tried and hanged. From November 1 to 3, 1831, Turner was interviewed in his cell by Thomas R. Gray, a local attorney, who kept a written record of Turner’s words. After pleading not guilty, Turner was convicted, and hanged on November 11, 1831; he was survived by a wife and children. The Confessions of Nat Turner, edited by Gray, was published in Baltimore in late November 1831. By the outbreak of the Civil War 50,000 copies of the Confessions are estimated to have been printed.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS (February 1818–February 20, 1895) Born Frederick Bailey in Talbot County on the eastern shore of Maryland, the son of Harriet Bailey and an unknown white man. In 1
826 he was sent to Baltimore by Thomas Auld, his master’s son-in-law, to live with Auld’s brother, Hugh, and his wife, Sophia. He received reading lessons from Sophia Auld until her husband forbade them; he then secretly taught himself to read and write. In 1833 he was sent back to Talbot County, where Thomas Auld hired him out as a field hand. After a failed escape attempt in 1836 he was again sent to live with Hugh and Sophia Auld in Baltimore, where he learned ship caulking and met Anna Murray, a free black woman. With her help, he escaped to Philadelphia on September 3, 1838, traveling by train and steamboat with protection papers borrowed from a free black merchant sailor. Anna Murray soon joined him in New York City, where they were married. They settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he took the name Douglass; in 1839 the first of their five children was born. In 1841 Douglass became a lecturer for the radical American Anti-Slavery Society, led by William Lloyd Garrison, and in 1845 he published his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself, which is estimated to have sold more than 30,000 copies by 1850. During his successful lecture tour in Great Britain and Ireland in 1845–47 a group of English supporters purchased his manumission from the Auld family, allowing Douglass to return to the United States without fear of apprehension by slavecatchers. He launched his own antislavery newspaper, North Star, in Rochester, New York, on December 3, 1847, and in July 1848 attended the woman’s rights convention held at Seneca Falls, New York. By the early 1850s Douglass had broken with Garrison and become an ally of Gerrit Smith, who advocated an antislavery interpretation of the Constitution and participation in electoral politics. He published his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, in 1855. Douglass argued for emancipation and the enlistment of black soldiers as essential war measures at the outbreak of the Civil War and became a supporter of Abraham Lincoln once the president adopted these policies. After the war he continued his advocacy of racial equality and woman’s rights while becoming a loyal supporter of the Republican Party, serving as U.S. marshal (1877–81) and recorder of deeds (1881–86) for the District of Columbia and as minister to Haiti (1889–91) under Republican administrations. His third autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, appeared in 1881 and in an expanded edition in 1892. After the death of Anna Murray Douglass in 1882, Douglass married Helen Pitts, a white woman’s rights activist, in 1884. He died of a heart attack at Cedar Hill, his estate in the Anacostia section of Washington, D.C.
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