While few free blacks took part in slave rebellions, a great many shared Denmark Vesey’s identification with Haiti. By the mid-1820s, free black communities in both northern and southern cities gathered annually to celebrate Haitian independence as proof, to quote one speaker in Baltimore, “that the descendants of Africa were never designed by their Creator to sustain an inferiority, or even a mediocrity, in the chain of being.” That was a crucial point for free African Americans, whose rights before the law had steadily declined since the Constitution took effect.
Federal action set the stage for discrimination by the states. The immigration law of 1790 reserved naturalized citizenship for “free white persons”; the Militia Act of 1792 excluded black men from service; and in 1810, the U.S. Post Office stipulated that only whites could carry the mail. Congress repeatedly welcomed new states that deprived black citizens of fundamental rights, and it never censured old states for withdrawing rights previously extended.
Close to 60 percent of free African Americans resided in southern states, whose lawmakers enacted the harshest restrictions. Starting with Virginia in 1793, states across the South prohibited or severely limited the entry of free black people, ordered those already resident to document their freedom before local authorities, and treated all who did not comply as fugitive slaves. By 1810, every southern state but Delaware had barred free blacks from testifying against white people in court, and in 1811, Georgia denied them the right to jury trials. Northern states passed a hodgepodge of discriminatory statutes that in some cases rivaled the South’s. By 1820, for example, most northern school systems were either segregated or entirely closed to black children, both Ohio and Illinois outlawed the entry of black settlers, and Massachusetts was the only northern state where an African American could serve as a juror.
In both the North and the South, black voting rights eroded too. As of 1800, with sixteen states in the union, all but Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia enfranchised free black men on the same basis as white men. But over the next half century just one incoming state (Maine) gave black men equal access to the ballot, and nine older states took it away—often at the same time that they removed property restrictions on the white electorate. By the 1850s, black men could participate in politics in just five of thirty-one states: Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine.
In free black communities, then, activism generally centered in churches and benevolent associations. Virtually all of them worked against slavery in some fashion, surreptitiously in the South and openly in the North. As the southern communities helped fugitive slaves make their way to free states, the northerners built a network of abolitionist societies—more than fifty by the late 1820s. Most of these groups were run by men, but a fair number were women’s organizations like the Colored Female Religious and Moral Society of Salem, Massachusetts, whose members gathered to “write and converse on the sufferings of our enslaved sisters.”
Black abolitionism was especially dynamic in Boston, whose General Colored Association agitated for racial equality as well as an end to slavery and worked tirelessly to knit free African Americans into a national movement. One of the Association’s leaders was David Walker, a tailor who galvanized black activists with his militant Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829). Condemning all manifestations of white supremacy and racism, this pamphlet called black America to rebel against every violation of the doctrine that “ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL!!” The Boston abolitionists also included a pioneer for women’s rights: Maria W. Stewart, a widowed domestic worker who became the first American-born woman to lecture in behalf of equality for her sex.
The most radical elaboration on republican ideals came from the printer Thomas Skidmore, a New York City labor activist who had grown up in an old Yankee farm family in Newtown, Connecticut. In 1829, Skidmore published a manifesto titled The Rights of Man to Property!, which proposed sweeping redistributions of wealth and power. The country belonged equally to all of its people, Skidmore proclaimed, and “the same eternal and indissoluble rights exist for all.” Every form of servitude should be abolished; every man and unmarried woman—white, black and Indian—should get a 160-acre homestead to call their own; factories, railroads, and other industrial property should be collectively owned; every adult should have full and equal voting rights; and government should consist of “a great judicial tribunal of all our citizens sitting in judgment over and deciding for themselves.” Skidmore promoted this program through the New York Working Men’s Party, which he helped to found in 1829. Less radical voices prevailed, however. Within a few months he and his handful of followers were pushed out of the party, and their independent efforts fell apart with Skidmore’s death in 1832.
His ideas lived on in piecemeal form. Over the next three decades, working people took part in various movements for land redistribution, for the abolition of slavery, for the establishment of cooperative workshops, for racial equality and for women’s rights. But many more years would pass before significant numbers came together, as Skidmore endorsed, to “oppose everything of privilege . . . in whatever shape it might present itself.”
CHAPTER
3
SLAVERY AND FREEDOM IN THE NEW REPUBLIC
On January 10, 1860, the Pemberton Mill, a cotton textile factory in Lawrence, Massachusetts, collapsed like a house of cards. Of the 670 workers buried in the rubble, 90 died and another 120 suffered severe injuries. Erected in 1853 at a cost of $800,000 and equipped with the latest in steam-powered machinery, the mill had been touted as the finest example of the vast northern textile industry, in which wage workers wove cloth from the cotton grown by slaves. In many ways the Pemberton epitomized the nation as a whole, a grand edifice standing on shaky pillars.
The Constitution’s ratification ushered in seventy years of national growth and prosperity. Land purchases and seizures extended the United States across the continent, from Florida to California and from New England to the Pacific Northwest. The population swelled from about 4 million in 1790 to over 31 million in 1860. Each decade brought a larger influx of immigrants, mostly from northwestern Europe and the British Isles. Close to 600,000 people arrived in the 1830s, 1.7 million in the 1840s, 2.6 million in the 1850s. Cities increased in numbers and size. In 1790 there were just six municipalities with more than 8,000 residents; by 1860 there were 141. New York’s population reached 1.2 million, Philadelphia’s 566,000, and six other cities topped 100,000—Boston, Baltimore, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Chicago, and New Orleans.
Agriculture, industry, and commerce flourished as never before. Cotton plantations spread across the lower South from the Atlantic coast to eastern Texas;corn, wheat, hog, and cattle farming proliferated in the Midwest;merchant wealth funded an industrial revolution that centered in the North but penetrated other regions too. More and more commodities were produced in factories, not only textile mills but also iron foundries, machine shops, printing plants, sugar refineries, meatpacking houses, boot and shoe factories, and furniture works. To fuel iron furnaces and power machinery, coal mining expanded from about 50,000 tons of output in 1820 to 14 million tons in 1860. East of the Mississippi, a giant network of new canals, paved roads, and over 30,000 miles of railroad track linked farms, plantations, factories, and mines to distant markets for their products. By 1860, the United States was the world’s fourth biggest industrial power (behind England, Germany, and France) and second to none in commercial agriculture. It produced two-thirds of the world’s raw cotton and industrial goods valued at more than $1.8 billion, with cotton textiles in the lead.
Injustice and inequality abounded as well. The 1860 census counted nearly 4 million slaves. Free workers and their dependents, about 12 million people in all, lived on wages that averaged under $1 a day. Restrictions on free African Americans were harsher than ever. Women of all colors still lacked political rights. Federal law still stipulated that only white immigrants could become citizens and required that they wait for five
years. In addition to dispossessing Indians, westward expansion involved the seizure of 1.2 million square miles of Mexican land. Two ruling classes—the South’s richest planters, the North’s industrial capitalists—dominated their respective regions and jockeyed for control of the federal government. Both regarded labor as nothing more than a commodity. The planters’ regime supported a thriving interstate slave trade, buying and selling an average of 7,500 people a year from 1820 to 1860. The Pemberton Mill’s owners calculated the market value of lives lost in the collapse at $500 for male heads of household down to $50 for children and paid just that to the dead’s survivors.
As oppression mounted, so did resistance. Working people asserted themselves through labor unions, political action, cooperatives, strikes, and countless challenges to slavery. As in the past, different groups of workers fought on different fronts. Inequality and plain bigotry divided women and men, white workers and workers of color, U.S. natives and immigrants, the free and the unfree. Amidst these divisions, however, a critical mass of people coalesced against slavery’s expansion into new territories. By 1860, this “Free Soil” coalition realigned American politics, and the compromises that had once secured slavery’s future frayed beyond repair.
“IF YOU CAN’T FIGHT, KICK”
The planters’ regime spared no effort to preserve and defend slavery. Only a third of the South’s white households owned slaves in 1830, and the proportion fell to a fourth by 1860. For that very reason, the planter elite—the richest 1 percent who owned one-quarter of all slaves—ruled the region with a heavy hand, organizing southern life to serve the slaveholding minority. Yet they never managed to squelch the tradition of resistance exemplified by the Tennessee slave who advised her children to, “Fight, and if you can’t fight, kick; and if you can’t kick, then bite.”
Planters’ supremacy in the South and their influence in Washington, D.C., owed a great deal to the cotton boom. While other cash crops—chiefly tobacco, rice, and sugar cane—remained important in parts of the South, cotton production soared from about 100,000 bales in 1800 to 5.4 million bales in 1860. The South’s wealthiest planters made their fortunes in this business, which also profited smaller planters, family farms, cotton brokers, cotton shippers, and slave traders. Northern capitalists had a big stake in the business too; many of them engaged in cotton trading, advanced loans to cotton planters, and invested in cotton textile factories. What served the planter elite thus appealed to a good portion of the white South and to much of the North’s ruling class.
At bottom, though, the planters’ regime rested on force. Armed and mounted posses policed country roads every night, on the lookout for “disturbances” among the slaves. Sentries patrolled cities and towns. Enormous state militias—more than 100,000 strong in Virginia alone—drilled frequently and mobilized at the least sign of trouble. Free people likely to inspire slave unrest faced increasing suppression. By the mid-1820s, nearly every southern abolitionist had been expelled from the region or intimidated into silence. White workers ran afoul of the law when they tried to organize; the courts routinely crushed their unions and strikes. Free blacks, who by 1860 numbered about 250,000 in slaveholding states, were now subject to curfews, public whippings for giving the slightest offense to whites, automatic imprisonment for possessing abolitionist literature, and statutory exclusion from learned professions and the majority of skilled trades.
Thousands of state and local laws targeted slaves. They were forbidden to raise a hand against any white person, to assemble without white supervision, to buy or sell anything without their masters’ permission, to leave a plantation at any time, to walk city streets after dark without written passes . . . the list went on and on. Most states made it a crime to teach slaves to read or write. By 1860, several states in the Deep South had prohibited manumission.
Whatever their knowledge of the statutes, every day reminded slaves of their status as chattel. The slave trade besieged family life, breaking up a quarter to a third of all marriages and snatching countless children from their parents. One of the first things adolescent girls learned about sex was that white men could rape black women with impunity; not a single slave-holding state defined such assaults as crimes. Attempts at book learning carried tremendous risks. As Hannah Crasson of Wake County, North Carolina, later remembered, “You better not be found trying to learn to read. Our marster was harder down on that than anything else.” Some masters forbade slaves to worship on their own. Mary Reynolds grew up on a Louisiana sugar plantation whose manager lurked around slaves’ cabins at night and threatened to “come in there and tear the hide off your backs” whenever he heard prayers or hymns.
Labor conditions varied considerably. As plantations multiplied, more and more slaves were field hands working in large, tightly supervised gangs. This system prevailed on the lower South’s cotton plantations, the upper South’s tobacco plantations, and the sugar plantations of Louisiana. But most slaves did other kinds of work. As late as the 1850s, roughly half were household servants, craftsmen, or field hands on farms too small to qualify as plantations (units with at least twenty slaves). Some of this group—mainly urban craftsmen and servants—hired out for wages, saw to their own maintenance, and paid their owners a weekly fee. Another 5 percent of slaves worked for industrial enterprises such as mines, railroads, and factories. While the vast majority of industrial slaves were owned or leased by the businesses that employed them, a few were hired for a wage. Not all plantation field hands did gang labor, moreover. The rice plantations of South Carolina, Georgia, and Louisiana used the task system, under which each slave got a daily assignment, worked with minimal supervision, and could stop once the job was done. Task labor was also the norm on the cotton plantations on the Sea Islands along the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina.
Whatever the setting, slaves who broke work rules risked physical assault from masters and mistresses, the overseers they hired, or the slaves they appointed as foremen or “drivers.” Some of this violence was simply sadistic. One tobacco manufacturer whipped a teenaged girl to death as his wife burned her with an iron. The Richmond Dispatch congratulated a factory overseer for shooting a bondsman who left the premises without permission. Jenny Proctor, born on an Alabama cotton plantation, spent her childhood working under a relentlessly cruel driver: “the least little thing we do he beat us for it and put big chains around our ankles and make us work with them on until the blood be cut out all around our ankles.”
By all accounts, though, most slaveholders took a businesslike approach to labor discipline and insisted that their agents do the same. A popular manual on the management of slaves summarized the strategy: “Never fail . . . to notice the breach of an established rule, and be equally unfailing in punishing the offender justly, according to the nature and circumstance of the offence. Never inflict punishment when in a passion, nor threaten it; but wait until perfectly cool.” Solomon Northrup, a free New Yorker kidnapped into slavery in Louisiana, saw this strategy at work during picking season on a cotton plantation: “It was rarely that a day passed without one or more whippings. This occurred at the time the cotton was weighed. The delinquent whose weight had fallen short, was taken out, stripped and made to lie on the ground, face downward, when he received a punishment proportioned to his offense. The number of lashes is graduated according to the nature of the case.”
But slavery was more than a business, and work rules were not the only dictates slave masters enforced with the whip. As one North Carolina jurist wrote in 1852, any hint of insolence on the part of a slave “violates the rules of propriety, and if tolerated, would destroy that subordination upon which our social system rests.” Masters promoted “propriety” by doling out countless punishments of the sort described here by Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist leader who had been a slave in Maryland:
A mere look, word, or motion . . . are all matters for which a slave may be whipped at any time. Does a slave look dissatisfied? It is said, he has the
devil in him, and it must be whipped out. Does he speak loudly when spoken to by his master? Then he is getting high-minded, and should be taken down a button-hole lower. Does he forget to pull off his hat at the approach of a white person? Then he is wanting in reverence, and should be whipped for it. Does he ever venture to vindicate his conduct, when censured for it? Then he is guilty of impudence,—one of the greatest crimes of which a slave can be guilty.
These humiliations—like armed patrollers, draconian laws, and everything else that propped up the planters’ regime—were designed to control slaves’ minds as well as their behavior. To make the system run smoothly, slaveholders had to make emancipation unthinkable.
The effort failed. Slaves repeatedly thought, sang, and dreamed about freedom, and defiant hopes often sparked rebellious action. Both forms of resistance required personal courage. Both were also collective projects, deeply rooted in the families and communities slaves constructed outside the meticulously supervised world of work. Labor from dawn to dark or longer absorbed most but not all of their waking hours. Work usually ended early on Saturdays, Sunday was virtually always a holiday, and most people could squeeze some spare minutes from the rest of the week. These spaces between the demands of work provided seedbeds for resistance.
Family life inspired and supported innumerable challenges to masters’ authority. In Maryland, Harriet Ross (mother of the famous Harriet Tubman) refused to give her youngest child to the Georgia slave trader to whom he had been sold. An older son later described her response when the trader and her master came knocking late at night: “She ripped out an oath and said, ‘You are after my son; but the first man that comes into my house, I will split his head open.’That frightened them, and they would not come in. So she kept the boy hid until the Georgia man went away.” In Virginia, John Jones Middleton left the plantation where he was repeatedly beaten and lived in nearby woods, his wife and children supplying him with food and harboring him in their cabin many a night. Stories like this abound in the memoirs written or dictated by former slaves. They do not always have happy endings;but their sheer volume illustrates how deeply family love and loyalties undercut slavery’s “rules of propriety.”
From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend Page 8
