The African Americans

by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

  The fraternity Hall formed is the oldest black institution in North America, and spawned lodges and other allied fraternities across the North—and after the Civil War, throughout the South. It became a driving force in the black antislavery movement and produced many of the nation’s most important black leaders and a large percentage of the black antislavery leadership, such as the incendiary David Walker and Lewis Hayden, both of Boston, and both of whom were Masons. Indeed, many local and national black community leaders in the 19th century—such as Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois—belonged to the fraternity, which continued to play an important role in the struggle for civil rights in the 20th century.

  Prince Hall, among his many activities, had petitioned the Massachusetts legislature to end the institution of slavery, to gain public support for black education, and to support black emigration. He fearlessly condemned the brutality that some whites showered on the city’s black citizens and called out for social and political equality, setting the primary goals of the antislavery movement, black and white, that would eventually arise in Boston. Equally important, white political, social, and religious leaders recognized Hall as the spokesman for his community and trusted his opinions. His business success and his prominence as a Freemason made his name one of the most recognizable of all African Americans throughout the North, and when he died, in 1807, newspapers around the country registered and lamented the loss.13

  Events further south, however, would help make discrimination the defining characteristic of the north, thus circumscribing the development of northern black society. By the 1820s, as the Reverend Hosea Easton painfully observed, while the country had been born with a fire for liberty, now a certain “darkness” had crept into the country’s soul and its drive for profit had made it insensible to those “allied to you by birth and blood.” Instead of enjoying the fruits and promise of liberty, millions of black people faced permanent, racial slavery riveted to their future and that of their descendants. Those supposedly free enjoyed few if any “freedoms” that white men were bound to recognize. The period of fluidity of race relations in early American history was over. As the Massachusetts-born minister Easton would ask:

  Are we eligible to an office? No.—Are we considered subjects of the government? No.—Are we initiated into free schools for mental improvement? No.—Are we patronized as salary men in any public business whatever? No.—Are we taken into social compact with Society at large? No.—Are we patronized in any branch of business which is sufficiently lucrative to raise us to any material state of honour and respectability among men, and thus, qualify us to demand respect from the higher order of society? No.—But to the contrary. Everything is withheld from us that is calculated to promote the aggrandizement and popularity of that part of the community who are said to be the descendants of Africa.14

  NOTHING MARKED THE CHANGE IN RACE RELATIONS MORE DRAMATICALLY THAN THE INVENTION OF THE COTTON GIN IN 1793, and its attendant economic and social transformation. The cotton revolution brought broad and rapid change to America’s economy—North and South—and to its very geography, causing immense, often devastating, changes to the lives of millions of black people and Native Americans. This transformation was enabled, like the transatlantic slave trade before it, by new technology. Just as the development of the ship quadrant and sextant had facilitated the seaborne trade in human beings, the introduction of the cotton gin, patented in 1794—a deceptively simple machine that separated cotton seeds from the fibers—exponentially increased the profitability of the crop and created new, unprecedented demands for labor that would only be satisfied by slaves. It would make cotton history’s first affordable luxury commodity, speed the growth of the white middle class, and bond the United States to the economics of slavery.

  The cotton gin was no accidental invention by a Yankee tinkerer with a little time on his hands. Rather, Eli Whitney’s invention resulted from sustained and deliberate efforts to create a staple crop that would meet the very specific demands of a large and global industrial machine—the same thing that sugar had done in the Caribbean and Latin America. It was no accident that the gin’s introduction coincided with Saint-Domingue’s removal from the international sugar market. What made cotton so profitable? It was easily stored and easily shipped, and it came into demand at a time when the prices of older staple crops like tobacco and rice were in decline. Hence, manufacturing and capital resources in the North were ready to exploit it, and a large workforce of slaves in the South was available to harvest it. The gin provided the final, critical missing piece to solve a global economic puzzle. But the gin itself was really just part of a much larger revolution. Cotton’s rise led to the creation of a new planter class with immense political power—a class that had access to new markets and new sources of capital (much of it, ironically, in the North)—and, above all, a class that would, in turn, create a new slave labor force.

  According to the census of 1790, approximately 650,000 slaves labored in six slave states, mostly picking rice, tobacco, and indigo. Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase in 1803 massively increased the size of the United States—and the amount of land available for farming. It made settlement of Alabama and Mississippi profitable, and gave a cash crop like cotton a vast hinterland with a ready transportation system and an outlet to the sea. This offered by far the greatest profit potential for a world wanting cotton products. The fact that Native Americans populated the lands proved an inconvenience, but the young nation had a novel solution. White settlers eager to raise cotton pressured the federal government to acquire the Indian land by any means necessary. The result was a relentless and often violent campaign of Indian removal—including the infamous Trail of Tears of the 1830s—and settlement of their lands by whites who replaced virgin forests with cotton plantations worked by black slaves.

  One of the most brutal chapters in American history was the forced removal of the so-called Five Civilized Tribes—the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole—slaveholders themselves who mistakenly believed that their “civilized” ways would enable them to assimilate into the new American nation and hold onto to their ancestral homelands. By 1850, most Native Americans had vanished from the Deep South, removed to “Indian Territory,” which later would become the state of Oklahoma. The United States now consisted of not 6, but 15 slave states, with 3.2 million slaves—of whom 1.8 million were working in cotton, yielding two-thirds of the world’s supply and powering the American economy. In 1790, this country produced 1.5 million pounds of cotton; by 1830, that figure grew to 331 million pounds. In 1860, incredibly, production had reached 2,275 million pounds per year.

  Cotton, in essence, reshaped the United States, greatly multiplying the profit potential for America’s planters—and their demand for slaves. More than ever before, slaves became prized commodities. After the 1808 ban on the international slave trade, American slave masters turned to “growing” their own laborers. Of all the slave societies in the New World, the United States alone succeeded in creating a slave force that reproduced itself. Fewer than 400,000 imported Africans in 1808 had by 1860 become a population of 4.4 million African Americans, 3.9 million of whom were slaves. According to the scholar of African American studies Ronald Bailey, between 1790 and 1860, the slave population of the United States increased between 25 percent and 33 percent per year, averaging 28.7 percent over the period.15

  Cotton gin patent, by Eli Whitney, March 14, 1794. National Archives, Digital Vers/Science faction, Corbis UK Ltd.

  Cotton brought about another demographic change—and for African Americans, a uniquely cruel and destructive one. On the new plantations of the Deep South, cotton meant longer hours for slaves, harder work, and increased brutality. It also meant that slave families in the Upper South had become suddenly and terrifyingly vulnerable. African Americans had spent decades creating these families under slavery, establishing bonds of marriage and kinship as best they could. But cotton’s spread into the Deep South created a
vast new market for slaves—slaves who could not be imported since the trade had been outlawed by the Constitution and Congress in 1808. Exploiting the natural increase in the slave population, however, made the states of the Upper South a warehouse of exportable human capital, creating an immensely profitable internal slave trade. Slave auctions became large and wrenching daily events in Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas, at which wives were separated from husbands, children from parents and siblings. Tens of thousands of uprooted African Americans were put on trains or boats or marched in chains, walking to the plantations of the Deep South. This became the Second Middle Passage, in many ways just as destructive as the first.16

  As cotton cultivation spread westward from South Carolina and Georgia into Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas, and northward up the Mississippi River Valley, more enslaved people were sent south in the internal trade than came across the Atlantic to North America in the first Middle Passage from Africa. To illuminate this history, we can trace the major routes of the internal trade with stories of individual slaves taken into the Deep South. The routes, along rural roads and small highways, bear little if any trace of their terrible past. But a few lingering signs of their hidden history remain, sites of old slave-trading blocks and abandoned plantations. More intimately, however, we can trace the Second Middle Passage in the words of several of those unfortunate men and women who endured it and later wrote about their experiences, creating a powerful collective portrait of the experience that no single story could encompass.

  BORN IN SOUTHAMPTON COUNTY, VIRGINIA, A SLAVE KNOWN AS “FED” OR BENFORD, AND LATER AS JOHN BROWN (1810–1876), was taken from his home with his mother in about 1820 and sent to Northampton County, North Carolina.17 Eighteen months later, he was sold to Georgia and never saw any of his family again. He grew up near Milledgeville on the plantation of the obstreperous Thomas Stevens, an owner known for driving his slaves to the limit and favoring brutal punishments. Stevens then bought lands in Cherokee country; such purchases were one of the motivations for the expulsion of the tribe and the resulting Trail of Tears exodus. Fed moved west with his owner to the area northwest of modern Atlanta.

  United States Slave Trade, 1830, Philadelphia (?). Engraving. Library of Congress. This image shows the Second Middle Passage.

  His master died in 1840, and Fed was inherited by Decatur Stevens, who proved even harsher and more brutal than Fed’s first owner. Fed met another slave, a man named John Glasgow, who had been born free in British Guiana and worked as a sailor, but was seized as a slave when he disembarked in Savannah, Georgia. Glasgow never accepted his enslavement and endured brutal beatings on Stevens’s plantation. He also told Fed of freedom in England, convincing him to one day seek his own liberation. In his memoir, Fed relates how it felt to be sold to the Deep South as property:

  I really thought my mother would have died of grief at being obliged to leave her two children, her mother, and her relations behind. But it was of no use lamenting, and as we were to start early next morning, the few things we had were put together that night, and we completed our preparations for parting for life by kissing one another over and over again, and saying good bye till some of us little ones fell asleep…. And here I may as well tell what kind of a man our new master was. He was of small stature, and thin, but very strong. He had sandy hair, fierce gray eyes, a very red face, and chewed tobacco. His countenance had a very cruel expression, and his disposition was a match for it. He was, indeed, a very bad man, and used to flog us dreadfully. He would make his slaves work on one meal a day, until quite night, and after supper, set them to burn brush or to spin cotton. We worked from four in the morning till twelve before we broke our fast, and from that time till eleven or twelve at night. I should say that on the average, and taking all the year round, we laboured eighteen hours a day well told. He was a captain of the patrol, which went out every Wednesday and Saturday night, hunting “stray niggers,” and to see that none of the neighbours’ people were from quarters….

  I remained at James Davis’s for nearly eighteen months. Once during that period, I remember he took me into the town to a tavern kept by one Captain Jemmy Duprey. There was a negro speculator there, on the look-out for bargains, but he would not have me. I did not know where I was going, when my master took me with him, but when I got back I told my mother, who cried over me, and said she was very glad I had not been sold away from her.

  But the time arrived when we were to be finally separated. Owing to a considerable rise in the price of cotton, there came a great demand for slaves in Georgia. One day a negro speculator named Starling Finney arrived at James Davis’s place. He left his drove on the highway, in charge of one of his companions, and made his way up to our plantation, prospecting for negroes…. I looked round and saw my poor mother stretching out her hands after me. She ran up, and overtook us, but Finney, who was behind me, and between me and my mother, would not let her approach, though she begged and prayed to be allowed to kiss me for the last time, and bid me good bye. I was so stupified [sic] with grief and fright, that I could not shed a tear, though my heart was bursting. At last we got to the gate, and I turned round to see whether I could not get a chance of kissing my mother. She saw me, and made a dart forward to meet me, but Finney gave me a hard push, which sent me spinning through the gate. He then slammed it to and shut it in my mother’s face. That was the last time I ever saw her, nor do I know whether she is alive or dead at this hour.18

  KATE DRUMGOOLD, BORN IN 1858 NEAR PETERSBURG, VIRGINIA, LIVED WITH HER MOTHER AND SISTERS UNTIL 1861, when her mother was sold south to Georgia. Fortunately for Drumgoold, she was reunited with her mother after the end of the war, but that rare event was unimaginable at the time.19 In her own words, she expressed her loss:

  My dear mother was sold at the beginning of the war, from all of her little ones, after the death of the lady that she belonged to, and who was so kind to my dear mother and all of the rest of the negroes of the place; and she never liked the idea of holding us as slaves, and she always said that we were all that she had on the earth to love; and she did love me to the last.

  The money that my mother was sold for was to keep the rich man from going to the field of battle, as he sent a poor white man in his stead, and should the war end in his favor, the poor white man should have given to him one negro, and that would fully pay for all of his service in the army…. And God, in His love for me and to me, never let me know of it, as did some of my own dear sisters, for some of them were hired out after the old home was broken up.

  My mother was sold at Richmond, Virginia, and a gentleman bought her who lived in Georgia, and we did not know that she was sold until she was gone; and the saddest thought was to me to know which way she had gone and I used to go outside and look up to see if there was anything that would direct me, and I saw a clear place in the sky, and it seemed to me the way she had gone, and I watched it three and a half years, not knowing what that meant, and it was there the whole time that mother was gone from her little ones.

  WILLIAM J. ANDERSON’S STORY IS PERHAPS BEST CAPTURED BY THE TITLE OF HIS MEMOIR: Life and Narrative of William J. Anderson, Twenty-four Years a Slave; Sold Eight Times! In Jail Sixty Times!! Whipped Three Hundred Times!!! or The Dark Deeds of American Slavery Revealed. Anderson was born in June 1811, in Hanover County, Virginia, to a woman named Susan and to Lewis Anderson, a slave who had served in the military, most likely in the Revolution.20 Self-taught, Anderson became an invaluable witness to the impact of the Second Middle Passage and relates a story that at times is simply difficult to bear:

  I lived at a place where I could see some of the horrors of slavery exhibited to a great extent; it was a large tavern, situated at the crossing of roads, where hundreds of slaves pass by for the Southern market, chained and handcuffed together by fifties—wives taken from husbands and husbands from wives, never to see each other again—small and large children separated from their parents. They were driven away to Ge
orgia, and Louisiana, and other Southern States, to be disposed of.

  O, I have seen them and heard them howl like dogs or wolves, when being under the painful obligation of parting to meet no more. Many of them have to leave their children in the cradle, or ashes, to suffer or die for the want of attentive care or food, or both….

  My master was considered one of those cunning, fox-like slaveholders; his craving for gold was almost insatiable; he kidnapped me by night, when all things were as silent as death, handcuffed and chained me securely, while I was ten miles from my mother, and young and inexperienced, helpless and ignorant of the geography of the country. The horrors of leaving my native land I cannot express. I was hurried off, and not permitted to get my clothes or bid my friends farewell.

  We arrived early next day in the city of Richmond, the capital of the State. The slave-market space was very much crowded; so he sold me privately, for three hundred and seventy-five dollars. A southern trader bought me; he asked me if I ever run, I told him I had. He asked me if I could run fast; I told him I could. He asked once more if I ever ran away; as I always stood much upon truth, I told him I had, once only, and stayed away one day. So he put me in jail, there to remain until he made up his drove of slaves, which was a very few days. But I, a free boy, locked up in jail! It was a bad and horrible feeling.

  In a few days he made up his drove, to the number of some sixty-five or seventy. Myself and several men, say twenty or more, were chained together, two and two, with a chain between. In this situation we started, on the 6th of Nov., 1826, for East and West Tennessee. Then we sang the song—