The African Americans

by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

  “Farewell, ye children of the Lord, &c.”

  We traveled a few days, and scenes of sadness occurred; the snow and rain came down in torrents, but we had to rest out in the open air every night; sometimes we would have to scrape away the snow, make our pallets on the cold ground, or in the rain, with a bunch of leaves and a chunk of wood for our pillow, and so we would have to rest the best we could, with our chains on. In that awful situation the reader may imagine how we gained any relief from the suffering consequent upon the cruel infliction we had to endure. We were driven with whip and curses through the cold and rain….

  In due time we arrived safely in the slave-pen at Natchez [Mississippi], and here we joined another large crowd of slaves which were already stationed at this place. Here scenes were witnessed which are too wicked to mention. The slaves are made to shave and wash in greasy pot liquor, to make them look sleek and nice; their heads must be combed, and their best clothes put on; and when called out to be examined they are to stand in a row—the women and men apart—then they are picked out and taken into a room, and examined. See a large, rough slaveholder, take a poor female slave into a room, make her strip, then feel of and examine her, as though she were a pig, or a hen, or merchandise. O, how can a poor slave husband or father stand and see his wife, daughters and sons thus treated.

  I saw there, after men and women had followed each other, then—too shocking to relate—for the sake of money, they are sold separately, sometimes two hundred miles apart, although their hopes would be to be sold together. Sometimes their little children are torn from them and sent far away to a distant country, never to see them again. O, such crying and weeping when parting from each other! For this demonstration of natural human affection the slaveholder would apply the lash or paddle upon the naked skin….

  Slave pen, Alexandria, Virginia, 1861–1865. Photograph. Library of Congress.

  We were obliged to work exceedingly hard, and were not permitted to talk or laugh with each other while working in the field. We were not allowed to speak to a neighbor slave who chanced to pass along the road. I have often been whipped for leaving patches of grass, and not working fast, or for even looking at my master. How great my sufferings were the reader cannot conceive. I was frequently knocked down, and then whipped up, and made to work on in the midst of my cries, tears and prayers. It did appear as if the man had no heart at all. My sufferings while obliged to pursue[,] my labor, picking cotton, were too intense for my poor brain to describe, and no one can realize such bodily anguish except one who has passed through the like. I was whipped if I did not pick enough, or if there was trash found in it. The most of slaveholders are very intemperate indeed. My master often went to the house, got drunk, and then came out to the field to whip, cut, slash, curse, swear, beat and knock down several, for the smallest offence, or nothing at all.

  He divested a poor female slave of all wearing apparel, tied her down to stakes, and whipped her with a handsaw until he broke it over her naked body. In process of time he ravished her person, and became the father of a child by her. Besides, he always kept a colored Miss in the house with him. This is another curse of Slavery—concubinage and illegitimate connections—which is carried on to an alarming extent in the far South. A poor slave man who lives close by his wife, is permitted to visit her but very seldom, and other men, both white and colored, cohabit with her. It is undoubtedly the worst place of incest and bigamy in the world. A white man thinks nothing of putting a colored man out to carry the fore row, and carry on the same sport with the colored man’s wife at the same time.

  SOLOMON NORTHUP’S STORY PROVIDES AN EVEN MORE TRAGIC ELEMENT. BORN FREE IN MINERVA, NEW YORK, THE SON OF MINTUS NORTHUP, a former slave from Rhode Island, Northup worked alongside his father on their farm in Granville, New York. His father owned enough property to become a voter, a significant achievement in a state that in the 1820s restricted the franchise by maintaining property requirements for potential black male voters, but not for whites. Solomon married at the end of 1829 and had a variety of occupations, including working the canal and waterways of western New York. In 1834, he and his wife, Anne, moved their three children to Saratoga, New York, the famed resort city.

  In 1841, however, Northup’s good luck would take a dramatic turn for the worse when he was tricked into traveling to Washington, D.C., with promises of a lucrative job. Instead, he was drugged, chained, and sold to a slave trader named James H. Burch who transported the helpless Northup to New Orleans and a life of slavery that endured until his rescue in 1853. As the title of his memoir reveals, he spent 12 horrid years in bondage, and the following passage details the process of being sold as property:21

  James H. Burch was a slave-trader—buying men, women and children at low prices, and selling them at an advance. He was a speculator in human flesh—a disreputable calling—and so considered at the South. For the present he disappears from the scenes recorded in this narrative, but he will appear again before its close, not in the character of a man-whipping tyrant, but as an arrested, cringing criminal in a court of law, that failed to do him justice.

  After we were all on board, the brig Orleans proceeded down James River. Passing into Chesapeake Bay, we arrived next day opposite the city of Norfolk. While lying at anchor, a lighter approached us from the town, bringing four more slaves. Frederick, a boy of eighteen, had been born a slave, as also had Henry, who was some years older. They had both been house servants in the city. Maria was a rather genteel looking colored girl, with a faultless form, but ignorant and extremely vain. The idea of going to New-Orleans was pleasing to her. She entertained an extravagantly high opinion of her own attractions. Assuming a haughty mien, she declared to her companions, that immediately on our arrival in New-Orleans, she had no doubt, some wealthy single gentleman of good taste would purchase her at once! …

  It was but a short time I closed my eyes that night. Thought was busy in my brain. Could it be possible that I was thousands of miles from home—that I had been driven through the streets like a dumb beast—that I had been chained and beaten without mercy—that I was even then herded with a drove of slaves, a slave myself? Were the events of the last few weeks realities indeed—or was I passing only through the dismal phases of a long, protracted dream? It was no illusion. My cup of sorrow was full to overflowing. Then I lifted up my hands to God, and in the still watches of the night, surrounded by the sleeping forms of my companions, begged for mercy on the poor, forsaken captive. To the Almighty Father of us all—the freeman and the slave—I poured forth the supplications of a broken spirit, imploring strength from on high to bear up against the burden of my troubles, until the morning light aroused the slumberers, ushering in another day of bondage.

  The very amiable, pious-hearted Mr. Theophilus Freeman, partner or consignee of James H. Burch, and keeper of the slave pen in New-Orleans, was out among his animals early in the morning. With an occasional kick of the older men and women, and many a sharp crack of the whip about the ears of the younger slaves, it was not long before they were all astir, and wide awake. Mr. Theophilus Freeman bustled about in a very industrious manner, getting his property ready for the sales-room, intending, no doubt, to do that day a rousing business.

  In the first place we were required to wash thoroughly, and those with beards, to shave. We were then furnished with a new suit each, cheap, but clean. The men had hat, coat, shirt, pants and shoes; the women frocks of calico, and handkerchiefs to bind about their heads. We were now conducted into a large room in the front part of the building to which the yard was attached, in order to be properly trained, before the admission of customers. The men were arranged on one side of the room, the women on the other. The tallest was placed at the head of the row, then the next tallest, and so on in the order of their respective heights. Emily [a child of seven or eight] was at the foot of the line of women. Freeman charged us to remember our places; exhorted us to appear smart and lively,—sometimes threatening, and again, holding o
ut various inducements. During the day he exercised us in the art of “looking smart,” and of moving to our places with exact precision.

  After being fed, in the afternoon, we were again paraded and made to dance. Bob, a colored boy, who had some time belonged to Freeman, played on the violin. Standing near him, I made bold to inquire if he could play the “Virginia Reel.” He answered he could not, and asked me if I could play. Replying in the affirmative, he handed me the violin. I struck up a tune, and finished it. Freeman ordered me to continue playing, and seemed well pleased, telling Bob that I far excelled him—a remark that seemed to grieve my musical companion very much.

  Next day many customers called to examine Freeman’s “new lot.” The latter gentleman was very loquacious, dwelling at much length upon our several good points and qualities. He would make us hold up our heads, walk briskly back and forth, while customers would feel of our hands and arms and bodies, turn us about, ask us what we could do, make us open our mouths and show our teeth, precisely as a jockey examines a horse which he is about to barter for or purchase. Sometimes a man or woman was taken back to the small house in the yard, stripped, and inspected more minutely. Scars upon a slave’s back were considered evidence of a rebellious or unruly spirit, and hurt his sale.

  AS THE SETTLEMENT OF THE DEEP SOUTH WAS REMAKING THE FACE OF THE UNITED STATES, defenders of slavery often went to great lengths to prove that the natural condition of a black person was perpetual enslavement. American independence may have been grounded in the notion that “all men are created equal,” but the realities of a burgeoning American economy founded upon cotton and slavery demanded a very different justification. Thus, a powerful movement took hold among the shapers of American popular opinion, North and South, who summoned the most fanciful arguments in defense of slavery, arguments grounded either in questionable interpretations of biblical passages or based on the claims of racial pseudo-science, to argue that Africans and Europeans did not share descent from common ancestors. New and bizarre anthropological ideas, created by scientists including those at Harvard University, measured black people’s heads and penises in a search for proof that blacks were inferior, perhaps not fully human. In the 1830s, southern ministers like Virginia’s Thornton Stringfellow asserted that slavery was legal and sanctioned “by Jesus Christ in his kingdom” and “that it is full of mercy.” Southern politicians like South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun famously argued that slavery was actually “a positive good,” sanctioned by God and suited to the needs and capacities of both blacks and whites.22

  A kind of national schizophrenia prevailed, with a country asserting its manifest destiny to spread both freedom and slavery throughout the continent. While slavery was either dead or dying in the North and Midwest, a racist ideology sought to shape and justify the treatment of and attitudes toward African Americans both within the institution of slavery and outside of it. In the South, slavery grew unbounded, bringing enormous wealth to a select few, while leaving a large class of whites outside its financial benefits but ensuring a social level below which they could never fall—a social level exclusively occupied by black slaves.

  At the same time, however, surprisingly enough, some African Americans in the South experienced levels of financial security and new levels of prosperity that few blacks in the supposedly free North ever could know. Indeed, by 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, more free black people lived in the South than in the North, a fact that strikes us today as counterintuitive. And these free black communities created their own social and cultural institutions, just as Prince Hall and Richard Allen did in Boston and Philadelphia.

  In Charleston, South Carolina, for example, the Brown Fellowship Society—an African American fraternal organization—was founded in 1790 and limited to 50 free blacks of “good character.” The society provided a strong social network along with a means of burial and widow support for a burgeoning free black society in the urban South. And its story illuminates a class system that emerged in black America long before the end of slavery—a system that underscores the tremendous diversity within the black community even as it violates modern sensibilities: The Brown Fellowship Society excluded dark-skinned blacks from membership. And its members, many of whom came to the states as a result of the Haitian Revolution, felt little in common with the slaves who surrounded them.

  In fact, according to the 1830 federal census, 43 percent of Charleston’s free black heads of households owned their own slaves. Many were family members, bought to keep them close and protect them. But unfortunately, this wasn’t the case for all—some were simply slaves, purchased and used for profit by their black owners. Notoriously, one of the society’s members, George Logan, was ejected from the association for enslaving another free black man. South Carolina’s William Ellison, a free black planter, owned more than 60 slaves and more than 1,000 acres—one of his sons even volunteered to fight for the Confederacy.

  Furthermore, the Brown Fellowship Society was not the only such organization to spring up in prosperous southern cities as “King Cotton” spread across the land. Free blacks in southern cities like Charleston sometimes actually did better economically than their northern counterparts because they were able to assume a middle position between slaves and whites, profiting from associations with both. Indeed, at the start of the Civil War, free blacks in New Orleans would initially side with the Confederacy, believing that they shared more common interests with white planters than with black slaves.23

  It’s hard to imagine how members of the Brown Fellowship Society must have felt, accruing wealth as black slave owners in a white-run slave society. Their vulnerability must have been palpable. They could not vote, serve on juries, or testify against white people, or (after 1835) operate schools to teach other African Americans. They were not free to marry or move without fear, and if they left the state, laws prohibited them from returning. They had no civil rights. Their business contracts with whites could be extraordinarily fruitful, as in the case of Jehu Jones, Sr., the city’s famed hotelier. But even he fell victim to legal restrictions on travel outside the state and could not return after visiting an ill daughter in New York. While these nominally free blacks could have careers as businessmen, innkeepers, skilled craftsmen, tailors, and shoemakers, their tightly restricted lives always kept them on the razor’s edge between slavery and freedom.

  And they were the lucky ones: They could harbor hopes and dreams. The vast majority of African Americans’ lives were swallowed up in despair as the 19th century unfolded. In 1800, Gabriel dreamed of overturning Virginia’s “slaveocracy,” in accord with the founding principles of American democracy. By 1831, however, a man named Nat Turner had embraced a far narrower goal, one grounded in a bitter history of oppression rather than in the embrace of America’s most noble aspirations.

  Born on October 2, 1800, in Southampton County, Virginia, the week before Gabriel was hanged, Turner impressed others with an unusual sense of purpose, even as a child.24

  Driven by prophetic visions and joined by a host of followers—but with no clear goals—on August 22, 1831, Turner and about 70 armed slaves and free blacks set off to slaughter the white neighbors who enslaved them. They began, in the early hours of the morning, by killing Turner’s master and his master's wife and children with axes. The story he told in his confession is chilling:

  It was then observed that I must spill the first blood. On which, armed with a hatchet, and accompanied by Will, I entered my master’s chamber, it being dark, I could not give a death blow, the hatchet glanced from his head, he sprang from the bed and called his wife, it was his last word, Will laid him dead, with a blow of his axe, and Mrs. Travis shared the same fate, as she lay in bed. The murder of this family, five in number, was the work of a moment, not one of them awoke; there was a little infant sleeping in a cradle, that was forgotten, until we had left the house and gone some distance, when Henry and Will returned and killed it….25

  Nat Turner conspiring with slaves
in Northampton, Virginia, 1831. Colored engraving. Private Collection, Bridgeman Art Library.

  By the end of the next day, the rebels had attacked about 15 homes and killed between 55 and 60 whites as they moved, perhaps by design, toward the religiously named county seat of Jerusalem, Virginia. Other slaves who had planned to join the rebellion suddenly turned against the insurrection after white militia began attacking Turner’s men, undoubtedly concluding that he would inevitably fail. Most of the rebels were quickly captured, but Turner eluded authorities for more than a month.

  On Sunday, October 30, a local white stumbled on Turner’s hideout and seized him. A special Virginia court tried him on November 5 and sentenced him to hang six days later. Afterward, enraged whites took his body, skinned it, distributed parts as souvenirs, and rendered his remains into grease. His head was removed and for a time sat in the biology department of Wooster College in Ohio. Of his fellow rebels, 21 also went to the gallows, and another 16 were sold away from the region. As the state reacted with harsher laws controlling black people, many free blacks fled Virginia for good. Turner remains a legendary figure, and it is likely that pieces of his body—including his skull and a purse made from his skin—have been preserved, arousing much controversy.26

  The difference between Gabriel and Turner is the difference between a man of optimism and a man of despair, one man fueled by ideological fervor and the other inspired by religious visions of vengeance. It’s a difference that tells a great deal about how slavery evolved in 19th-century America. Moreover, the Turner event would be, in the white southern mind, forever linked to the rise of northern abolitionism.

  AT RICHARD ALLEN’S MOTHER BETHEL CHURCH IN PHILADELPHIA IN JANUARY 1817, black leaders organized a meeting that showed just how much had changed in the years since the Age of Revolutions. The free black leaders of Philadelphia—the shining star of the free North—wished to discuss the possibility of leaving this country and immigrating to Africa. Back in December 1816, in the halls of Congress, white leaders like James Monroe, James Madison, and Henry Clay founded the American Colonization Society (ACS), formed to return freed slaves and free black people to Africa, their answer to the problem of American slavery and race relations.