An African American and Latinx History of the United States

by Paul Ortiz

  Four years later, in 1826, a group of enslaved African Americans on a slave-trading vessel fresh out of the port of Baltimore bound for Georgia rose up and seized control of the slave ship Decatur. After throwing the captain and first mate overboard, the insurrectionists ordered the surviving crew members to steer a course for Haiti and liberty. Unfortunately, the ship was soon boarded by the crew of a Yankee whaling vessel. The mutineers were seized and brought to New York. Although most of the slave rebels managed to escape soon after landfall, William Bowser, one of the leaders of the revolt, was sentenced to death.53

  In 1825, free African Americans in Baltimore gathered to celebrate the twenty-first anniversary of Haitian independence. Honoring the Haitian Revolution in Baltimore was especially meaningful in light of the grueling conditions that African Americans faced in Maryland. Maryland was a slave state that bordered nonslave states of the North, and Baltimore was a large slave entrepôt. Slave traders thrived in the region. They brokered the sale of thousands of slaves from Virginia and Maryland to toil on the plantations and slave labor camps of the booming South of the Mississippi River Valley. Black families were routinely broken apart by sales.54 A Baltimore-based reporter noted in 1845:

  Dealing in slaves has become a large business—establishments are made in several places in Maryland and Virginia, at which they are sold like cattle. These places of deposit are strongly built, and well supplied with thumb-screws and gags, and ornamented with cowskins and other whips, often-times bloody! From these prisons they are driven in droves to the Southern market, and the cruelties and atrocities practiced upon them between Baltimore, Washington, and New Orleans, are scarcely excelled by the agonies of the middle passage.55

  A spectator of a slave auction in Baltimore wrote, “I saw a mother whose very frame was convulsed with anguish for her first born, a girl of 18, who had been sold to this dealer and was among the number then shipped. I saw a young man who kept pace with the carriages, that he might catch one more glimpse of a dear friend, before she was torn forever from his sight. As she saw him, she burst into a flood of tears, sorrowing most of all that they should see each other’s faces no more.”56 Frederick Douglass recalled of his youth in Baltimore, “In the deep still darkness of midnight, I have been often aroused by the dead heavy footsteps, and the piteous cries of the chained gangs that passed our door. The anguish of my boyish heart was intense.”57

  The historians Ned and Constance Sublette have argued, “No less than any other form of capitalism, slavery was premised on continual expansion.”58 Baltimore’s proximity to Northern cities that were heavily invested in slavery’s infrastructure of credit, insurance, shipbuilding, and land speculation in the South made the Maryland port a key junction point for providing slave labor and commodities to New Orleans and other Southern ports.59 Approximately one million enslaved workers were shipped from cities such as Baltimore, Charleston, South Carolina, and Washington, DC, to the burgeoning plantations of the Deep South, which supplied the majority of the world’s cotton to Great Britain, France, and other rapidly industrializing nations.60 According to one historian, “In 1830, the aggregate value of United States slaves was about $577 million. The economic power value in 2014 dollars would be $9.84 trillion (56 percent of 2014 GDP).”61

  Another observer wrote in anguish in 1828,

  When I reflect that such shocking and flagitious spectacles, as chains, handcuffs, soul drivers, and human victims, can be exhibited on the Christian Sabbath in the city of Baltimore, and with that impunity, nay, under the immediate inspection of professors of religion, many of whom contribute to the perpetuation of this hellish traffic, in their exercise of the elective franchise—when I reflect that the ministers of the gospel, for the most part, are as silent on this subject as the dead, I tell you, the blood runs cold in my veins, “I” indeed “tremble for my country.”62

  Slavery inflicted a state of terror in Black communities. Deceitful traders kidnapped free Blacks, often young children, in cities like Philadelphia and transported them to Baltimore for sale. The Pennsylvania Freeman noted, “There is [sic] about 25 or more young men, or rowdies I ought to say, who make a practice of enticing away from Philadelphia poor neglected colored children, and bring them to this market [Baltimore]; and, from outward appearances here, they take into Slavery more every year than all the Anti-Slavery Societies take from it.”63 William Watkins, a Baltimore resident who was a prominent educator, leader of the free Black community, and the adoptive parent of a young girl, Frances Ellen Watkins, lamented, “When our children are out of our sight, we feel a painful anxiety for their safety, which none experience but those who are similarly circumstanced.”64 The National Era observed: “The laws of Maryland were framed with a special eye to the oppressor’s interests, rather than to those of the oppressed—to protect the strong rather than the weak!”65

  African Americans in Maryland struggled to keep their families intact. Nine-year-old Henry Highland Garnet’s parents decided to flee Maryland to avoid being sold separately. After following the Underground Railroad to New York, young Henry served as a cabin boy on voyages to Cuba, where he witnessed firsthand the horrors of Spanish slavery.66 Charity Still escaped with her four children in an effort to be reunited with her husband in New Jersey, only to be recaptured and returned to her master on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Shortly thereafter, Still escaped once again but had to leave two of her children behind in slavery, one of whom was later beaten to death.67 Henry Stewart, who escaped slavery from Maryland in 1855, vividly recalled the time when his master had negotiated the sale of a young boy on his plantation to a Georgia slave trader. When the boy’s mother discovered this, she barricaded the young child in her house and yelled at the dumbfounded slave monger, “You are after my son; but the first man that comes into my house, I will split his head open.”68 In 1849, Harriet Tubman escaped from Eliza Ann Brodess’s Eastern Shore estate to freedom in Philadelphia. Barely a year later, Tubman made her way back to Maryland. The woman who became known as both “Moses” and “General Tubman” began liberating first her family members and later other enslaved people as she ingeniously helped to build up the foundation of the Underground Railroad in Baltimore.69

  These self-emancipated abolitionists undermined slavery from within.70 “Runaway slave” notices published in Southern newspapers bear witness to the struggle to keep kin and community together. The following notice was printed in the Baltimore newspaper the Sun in September 1842:

  200 DOLLARS REWARD—Ranaway from the subscribers, living 4 1/2 miles from Baltimore, on the Frederick Turnpike, on Saturday night, Sept 3d, 1842, TEN NEGROES, answering to the following descriptions: REISIN, a very dark Negro Man, aged about 36 years, 5 feet 6 or 7 inches high; EVELINA, his wife, a bright mulatto, aged about 35 years, who also took with her son DANIEL, a bright mulatto, aged nine years; FLAVELLA, a dark mulatto, aged about 34 years; LUCY, a bright mulatto, aged about 18 years; GREEN, a bright mulatto, aged about 13 years; JOHN, a dark mulatto, aged about 10 years; with 1 Negro Boy 5 years, and 2 female children, one an infant.

  It is supposed that JOHN SMITH, (husband of Flavella), has absconded with them—he is a negro about 35 or 36 years of age, 6 feet 1 or 2 inches in height, lisps slightly when speaking.71

  Free black people in Baltimore and Maryland endured the same punishing social conditions facing their counterparts throughout the South. They were accused of insolence, rampant criminality, and collusion with the Underground Railroad. Slaveholders pushed for the passage of laws to force free Blacks to move out of the region.72 The Baltimore-based Niles Weekly Register magazine commented, “There is no State in this Union, in which the ingredients for civil strife, of the most fearful character, are so largely congregated as in the State of Maryland.”73 William Watkins remarked,

  We live among a professedly Christian people, whose comfort, prosperity and happiness, have been greatly promoted by our peaceable demeanor, our docility and industry; and yet, such is the inveterately bi
tter prejudice entertained against us—such the jealous suspicion with which we are viewed—such the consequently illiberal, the unjust, the cruel policy exercised in relation to us, that we can scarcely feel, at any time, secure, either in our persons or property.74

  State governments and private citizens used every weapon at their disposal to beat back Black resistance.75 When a group of escaped slaves was spotted outside Rockville, Maryland, the town’s white male populace mobilized and carried out an assault designed to strike fear into any would-be runaways. An account of the confrontation appeared in the National Anti-Slavery Standard: “I learn from a gentleman who was present at the arrest of the gang of runaway negroes, near Rockville, Maryland, that they were treated in the most brutal manner by their captors. When surrounded by the Rockville volunteers, they were commanded to surrender, and because one out of the forty showed a determination to resist a whole volley of balls from rifles and pistols was poured indiscriminately among them.”76 The proslavery correspondent who told this story reported that the white attackers “regretted that they ‘could not make the damn niggers resist so that they might have the pleasure of shooting them all down.’” Whites who did not own slaves routinely served in slave patrols or sometimes in vigilante groups to lay claim to a tenuous white citizenship earned by the protection of private property—wealthier people’s property.77

  Even Blacks who had managed to purchase their freedom knew that the limited liberties they enjoyed could be taken from them in an instant. Free African Americans in Baltimore opened their newspapers one day in the summer of 1827 to read the following warning:

  MAYOR’S OFFICE

  —NOTICE TO PERSONS OF COLOUR.—

  The city Watchmen are authorised and directed to arrest and convert to the Watch Houses of their districts, all persons of colour found in any of the streets, lanes, alleys, or any open grounds in their respective Wards, at or after the hour of 11 o’clock, P.M. unless such person shall have a written permit, from his or her master or mistress.78

  Like their counterparts in other major cities, the free Black community in Baltimore built strong cultures of resistance by organizing churches, schools, and fraternal organizations for mutual aid and survival.79 These institutions would serve African Americans well for the struggles to come. Generations later, the Christian Recorder asked: “Look back at 1816. What do we see? [Richard] Allen, Coker, and the little band of noble heroes in Baltimore and Philadelphia.”80 The Reverend Daniel Coker preached freedom from the pulpit of Baltimore’s African Methodist Episcopal Church in the 1810s, and the Black community’s persistence served as an inspiration for generations of abolitionists, including Benjamin Lundy, William Watkins, Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and many others. William Watkins was a graduate of Rev. Coker’s Bethel Charity School and went on to found Watkins’ Academy for Negro Youth in the 1820s.

  Even as merchants promoted the city as a haven for profits in slavery, in the early 1800s, African Americans and their allies transformed Baltimore into a center of anti-slavery resistance.81 Well into the twenty-first century, archeologists continued to discover hidden tunnels, camouflaged cisterns, and secret compartments in church basements that harbored fugitive slaves. Baltimore’s white elite despaired of the ever-expanding Underground Railroad in Maryland and beyond.82 Writing as “A Colored Baltimorean,” William Watkins penned a series of commentaries beginning in the 1820s for Freedom’s Journal, one of the first Black newspapers in the country, in which he predicted doom for the nation that perpetuated human servitude: “Slavery has destroyed kingdoms and empires, and what may we not expect will happen to those religious communities in which this crying evil is tolerated? The least evils that we can expect are disaffection and division.”83

  African Americans in Baltimore who gathered in August 1825 to commemorate Haitian independence and the first successful slave revolution in history knew firsthand what tyranny was; they lived every day with the fear of physical violence, economic insecurity, and re-enslavement. They looked to Haiti as a beacon of liberty unlike anything that existed in the United States. Local people had direct contact with Haitians whose masters had brought them to Baltimore decades earlier to flee the results of the revolution, and they were quite aware of the negative narrative that their white counterparts attempted to spin about the country of Haiti.84 Haiti was viewed by the ruling classes of the United States, France, and Great Britain as a threat to slavery, colonialism, and white rule, a veritable “contagion of liberty.” Thomas Jefferson had plotted against the Black revolutionaries and had urged Napoleon Bonaparte to re-enslave the upstart Haitians.85 Event organizers in Baltimore designed their Haitian tribute to provide the kind of democratic education to each other and to their youth that could not be attained from their own nation’s educational institutions.

  They raised their glasses to “Washington, Toussaint, and Bolivar—Unequalled in fame—the friends of mankind—the glorious advocates of Liberty.”86 With this gesture, African Americans connected the fate of their own freedom with the emancipation of people in Latin America and the Caribbean. The toast reflected a distinct understanding of the connections between movements for freedom throughout the Americas. Simón Bolívar (1783–1830), the former slave owner in the land that was to become the Venezuelan republic, was an admired figure in African American communities because of his Decrees of 1816, which freed enslaved people willing to fight on behalf of the Third Republic of Venezuela. These declarations followed Bolívar’s meeting with the Haitian president Alexandre Pétion, who pledged military and financial support to El Liberator contingent on his ending slavery. In gratitude, Bolívar proclaimed, “Should I not let it be known to later generations that Alexandre Pétion is the true liberator of my Country?”87

  The port of Baltimore was situated at the nexus of Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, and Latin America. While slave traders and merchants attempted to turn the Eastern Seaboard into a springboard for a continental slave empire, African American freedom fighters sought to destabilize that empire from within. If cities such as Baltimore were conduits for slavery and racial capitalism, African Americans were determined to transform their neighborhoods into communities of struggle. The people of this booming port city were at the epicenter of the greatest questions bedeviling the young republic. Baltimore’s Black churches, neighborhoods, hidden cellars, and shipyards nurtured freedom fighters who carried the African American freedom struggle out of embattled Baltimore and into the broader world. Charity Still, Harriet Tubman, William Watkins, Frederick Douglass, and so many others left Baltimore to become prophets of justice. Their children and their pupils carried on the struggle into the era of the Civil War. Frances Ellen Watkins, whose career as an abolitionist, Underground Railroad conductor, writer, and cofounder of the National Association of Colored Women spanned seven decades, spoke for Black Baltimoreans when, years after departing from the tormented city, she wrote the poem “Bury Me in a Free Land”:

  Make me a grave where’er you will,

  In a lowly plain, or a lofty hill;

  Make it among earth’s humblest graves,

  But not in a land where men are slaves.

  I could not rest if I heard the tread

  Of coffee gang to the shambles led,

  And the mother’s shriek of wild despair

  Rise like a curse on the trembling air.

  If I saw young girls from their mother’s arms

  Bartered and sold for their youthful charms,

  My eye would flash with a mournful flame,

  My death-paled cheek grow red with shame.

  I ask no monument, proud and high.

  To arrest the gaze of passers-by;

  All that my yearning spirit craves.

  Is bury me not in a land of slaves.88

  In 1827, Freedom’s Journal joined Black Baltimoreans in promoting emancipatory internationalism by linking together the fate of African Americans with their embattled brothers and sisters in Latin America,
stating:

  The truth is, the new Republics of North and South America have set us an example on the subject of slavery, which we should do well to imitate, under such modifications as our peculiar circumstances render necessary. If we remember right, the last slave in Colombia is to be emancipated within the present year. Peru has essentially lightened the burden which for centuries had oppressed the poor Indians, and Mexico evinced by her decision in enforcing the law on behalf of enslaved Africans, that she is determined not to be behind her sister Republics in this cause of justice, humanity and religion.89

  African Americans paid tribute to slave rebellions, wars of independence, and revolutions against caste oppression that were firing the Western Hemisphere’s nights with the glow of freedom. The steady drumbeat of anticolonial insurgencies filled African Americans with hope. Though the Freedom’s Journal’s analysis of the outcome of the Latin American independence wars exaggerated their immediacy—the final abolition of slavery in Colombia would not occur until 1851—the newspaper’s main argument was that one had to study events in Mexico and Latin America if one hoped to gain a greater understanding about the processes of emancipation and democracy.

  Meanwhile, the progress of antislavery insurgencies in Haiti, Mexico, and Latin America filled US political leaders with dread. Something would have to be done to limit the spread of liberty to those whom it was not intended to grace. John Adams created a rigid framework for US American exceptionalism by arguing that the Black people of the Western Hemisphere did not have the capacity for self-rule. In 1815, the former president of the United States asked, “When the National Convention in France voted all the Negroes in St. Domingo, Martinique, Guardaloupe [sic] St. Lucie [sic] & free at a breath did the poor Democracy among the Negroes gain any thing by the Change?” Contrasting the Haitian and American Revolutions, Adams depicted the Haitian masses as ignorant: “Did they not immediately fall into the Power of Aristocrats of their own Colour? Are they more free, from Toussaint to Petion & Christophe? Do they live better? Bananas and Water, they Still enjoy, and a whole Regiment would follow a Leader, who should hold a Salt fish to their Noses.”90 John Adams associated democracy with whiteness and tyranny with blackness.