Passenger on the Pearl

by Winifred Conkling

  —John Slingerland, Albany, New York

  Sold South: The Second Middle Passage

  The United States had an uncomfortable relationship with slavery from its earliest days. As early as the Constitutional Convention of 1787, legislators disagreed about the question of whether slavery should be allowed. As part of a compromise to keep the young country united, Congress agreed to phase out the international slave trade after 20 years. As of January 1, 1808, it became illegal to import slaves from overseas, although it remained legal to buy and sell enslaved people already in the country.

  At the same time that Congress banned the transatlantic slave trade, there was an increase in demand for slave labor in the South. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 expanded the land available for agricultural development, and cotton and sugar, two of the most popular crops, were also very labor intensive. While there were too few slaves in the Lower South, there were too many in the Upper South. Maryland and Virginia had a surplus of slaves because of natural population increases and because farmers were planting their fields with wheat and other crops that required less labor to produce.

  The result: a domestic slave trade from the Upper South to the Lower South that became known as the Second Middle Passage. (The original Middle Passage involved the transportation of enslaved people from Africa to North America.) At least one million slaves, including six members of the Edmonson family, were part of this forced migration between 1790 and 1860.

  NINE

  New Orleans

  ONCE AGAIN, EMILY and the others sent south had to endure travel in the dark, poorly ventilated spaces below deck, in the cargo hold of the Union. And, not surprisingly, once again Emily and Mary suffered from severe seasickness, this time much worse than the episode on the Pearl. By the time the Union reached the Carolina coast, the winds had begun to gust from the south, pounding and rocking the ship in the ocean waves. Emily could not keep fluids down and her lips became dry and cracked. She was dangerously dehydrated, her skin wrinkled like crumpled paper, her eyes sunken into their sockets. Her breathing grew fast and shallow. Mary’s condition was not much better.

  How long could they hold on like that? Their brothers carried them up on deck for fresh air whenever they could do so safely, but most of the time they could do little more than sit with Emily and Mary, wipe their faces, and tell them that things were going to get better. In time, the situation did improve: The winds died down and the girls began to recover. They remained weak, but they were able to hold down fluids, giving their bodies the chance to regain strength.

  Emily and the other people aboard the Union faced another challenge when they reached the dangerously shallow waters around Key West, Florida. Unfamiliar with the sandbars, reefs, and other hazards hidden just beneath the surface of the water, the captain of the Union raised a flag to signal a pilot-boat captain to guide them through the area. Before the smaller boat approached, the captain of the Union hid the slaves below deck, perhaps thinking that he could negotiate a lower fee if the other captain didn’t know about the valuable cargo he was carrying. To conceal the slaves, the captain placed a heavy canvas cover over the grated hatchway door, blocking the air circulation in the overheated, stuffy cargo hold below.

  It did not take long for the air to grow stagnant and stale. Emily felt faint and struggled to breathe while the captain and pilot up on deck squabbled about the price. The men and women had been separated into two cargo areas. One of the men took a stick and punctured a hole through the canvas on their side, introducing some fresh air. The women were unable to break the seal; they shouted for help, but no one responded. Emily breathed the hot, used air, but she was growing weaker by the minute.

  After what felt like enough time to sail all the way around the world, a member of the crew pulled back the canvas, allowing air back into the hold below deck. Emily gasped to fill her lungs with as much air as they could hold. Then, one after another, as they caught their breath, the captives began to crawl out onto the deck. When they could safely move to the fresh air, Mary and Emily were too weak to stand, so once again their brothers had to carry them into the open.

  The captains had not been able to agree on terms, so the pilot-boat captain refused to help them. Without a guide, the captain of the Union could not navigate the treacherous waters, so he had to turn back and sail the long way around Key West to remain in safer waters. That, along with foul weather, extended the length of the trip by several days. As a result, supplies of food and water began to run low. The captain rationed water, providing the crew with one quart of water a day and limiting the enslaved to just a gill a day, or about five ounces each. Emily sipped her ration slowly, but when she finished, her mouth still felt dry. She tried to deny her thirst, but she longed for fresh water. In an expression of kindness, some of the sailors shared a pint of their water supply with Emily and Mary, who, in turn, shared with the other women.

  When the Union finally approached New Orleans on June 14, 1848, the weather turned against them again. As they arrived at the mouth of the Mississippi River, another violent storm battered the ship. The waves rolled the ship so severely that when a pilot boat approached to guide them on the journey upriver to New Orleans, it would sometimes disappear from sight as if swallowed by the waves, only to rise up and appear again when the wave passed by. Emily may have feared what awaited them in the South, but she was grateful to reach land after an exhausting 20-day journey.

  TO THE SHOWROOM

  The following morning, at about ten o’clock, Emily and the other 34 enslaved people left the Union and walked about six blocks through the city to a slave pen run by another partner of Bruin & Hill. Trembling and terrified, Emily began to cry. Without warning, an overseer approached and struck her on the chin, saying: “Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about.” He followed with another threat: “There is the calaboose [a public place for flogging slaves], where they whip those who do not behave themselves!”

  As soon as the man stepped away, a woman she did not know whispered to Emily that she needed to force herself to look as cheerful as possible or she would be beaten. Emily wondered if she would ever be able to master such a false face. One of her brothers approached a moment later and asked what the woman had said; when she told him, he encouraged Emily to follow the advice.

  Later that afternoon, Emily watched as her brothers were taken away. When she saw them a few hours later, she barely recognized them: Their hair had been cut short, their mustaches shaved off, and their fine butler’s clothing had been exchanged for blue jackets and pants made of coarse fabric, the clothing of field slaves. Not long afterward, an overseer presented Emily and Mary with their uniforms—plain calico-print dresses and kerchiefs for their hair.

  Once they had been properly outfitted, some of the slaves were forced to stand on an open porch facing the street and display themselves to people walking by. The porch served as a store window—an outdoor showroom—and they were the merchandise. Emily and the others waited inside; and when buyers called, they paraded across the auction floor in rows. Emily tried to smile and look pleasant, but there was no joy in her expression. Some of the men in the crowd told vulgar jokes and taunted the girls as they passed, but Emily had figured out that she had to tolerate and ignore their behavior.

  A man took a liking to one of the girls near Emily. He called the girl to him, then demanded that she open her mouth so that he could look at her teeth, as if he were inspecting livestock. He touched her as he pleased, and the young girl had to stand and bear it without resistance.

  Detail from an illustration, “Slaves for Sale: A Scene in New Orleans,” published in The Illustrated London News April 6, 1861. Harper’s Weekly printed it with the title “A Slave Pen at New Orleans Before the Auction” on January 24, 1863.

  While no one knows the details of what Emily and Mary were forced to endure in the showroom, in many cases prospective buyers took slaves into back rooms for a closer, private inspection. A buyer interested in
purchasing a particular slave could make a detailed examination of the property, demanding that male slaves take off all their clothes and females strip to the waist. Buyers looked for scars and signs of beatings, which could indicate a slave’s defiant nature or a history of misbehavior. Some buyers also took advantage of the opportunity to molest or shame a girl or young woman who could not defend herself.

  Watching a girl near her being manhandled, Emily burned with humiliation and anger. How could one person treat another with so little dignity? Of course, Emily knew that when she was chosen, she, too, would have to accept such treatment without complaint in order to avoid beatings—or worse.

  Unfortunately, it wasn’t long before an interested buyer came to the slave trader and asked for a young, attractive girl to hire as a housekeeper. The trader called for Emily.

  Emily stepped forward, trembling. Fear and outrage left her cold and hollow. Surely no one would want her; she was just a girl. She could not be taken. She did not know what she would do without her sister. She tried to appear cheerful, but her chin quivered and tears slipped down her cheeks. The buyer looked her over and dismissed her. He told the slave trader that he refused to consider buying Emily because he had “no room for the snuffles in his house.”

  Once they were off the porch and out of view of the buyers, the trader slapped Emily across the face, hard. Her tears had lost him a $1,500 sale. He warned her that there would be worse if she didn’t stop crying and look pleasant and willing in front of future customers.

  All their lives, Emily and her siblings had been taught by their mother to conduct themselves with dignity and modesty. Now, they had to stand before strangers and allow them to violate their privacy and touch them as they pleased—and they had to smile all the while or face the whip. She had been spared for the moment, but Emily knew that it was a matter of time before she and her sister would be chosen.

  Shades of Black

  In addition to physical and emotional abuse, many female slaves were sexually abused by their owners and by other men they encountered in positions of power. Since they were considered property, enslaved women had no legal defense or recourse if they were raped or sexually molested. As a result, many black slaves gave birth to mixed-race children.

  By law, any child of an enslaved mother was legally a slave, regardless of the legal status of the father. This practice resulted in several race classifications:

  • Mulatto referred to a person with one black and one white parent; the word is derived from the Spanish word mula, meaning mule.

  • Quadroon referred to a person with one-quarter black ancestry.

  • Octoroon referred to a person with one-eighth black ancestry.

  These terms had legal significance in the South, since many people who had fair skin were legally slaves. In many cases, light-skinned slaves were chosen for domestic work inside the home, while darker-skinned slaves worked in the fields.

  Today, these race classifications are considered offensive, and a growing number of Americans classify themselves as “mixed race”—nine million people, almost 3 percent of the population, in the 2010 census.

  WITNESS TO HORRORS

  Behind the closed doors of the showroom, beyond the view of the public, Emily witnessed the horrors and cruelty of the southern slave system. Not long after she arrived at the slave pen, Emily met a young woman who was also from Alexandria, Virginia. The girl was quite small, and very fine looking, with beautiful long, straight hair. Emily didn’t know her age, but she thought she was Mary’s age, 15, or perhaps even younger. Shortly after they met, the girl was sold.

  Emily didn’t expect to see her again, but a few days later the girl returned. Emily overheard the overseer say that she had been returned because she did not suit her purchaser. The seller had to refund the dissatisfied buyer’s money, and he was enraged at the girl for not being more cooperative. Emily did not watch the girl getting flogged, but she saw the brutal consequences. The girl had been whipped so viciously that sections of her flesh had been shredded into bloody strips. Emily was not surprised that the girl was beaten, but she did not understand why the slave owner would express his anger by destroying his property, or what was considered his property in the eyes of the law.

  Not long after the beating, Emily heard the overseer say that he would never flog another girl in that way again because, he said, it was too much for anyone to bear. Emily wondered if the guard experienced this change of heart because he observed his victim’s ongoing suffering during weeks of painful recovery; it is one thing to snap a whip and another to witness the gore.

  This iconic 1863 photograph shows the scars of a Mississippi slave who was beaten by his overseer.

  The cruelty never seemed to end. Not long after the incident with the Alexandria girl, a young man was also returned to the slave trader. The man who bought him claimed that he was not a good worker; the enslaved man said that he was brokenhearted because he and the woman he loved had been sold to different owners and separated. The slave owner refunded the buyer’s money and then pledged to flog the slave nightly for a week.

  Each stroke of the slave trader’s bullwhip cut a bloody gash across the man’s back. After about 200 lashes, the slave trader tired. He then demanded that each of the male slaves in the prison lay on five additional lashes with all his strength. Anyone who did not whip his fellow slave harshly enough was subjected to being flogged himself.

  In the slave yard, beatings were not limited to adults. No one confined there—male or female, young or old—was allowed to sleep in the daytime. Sometimes young children would become drowsy and take a brief nap in the afternoon; if the overseer caught the children asleep, they were beaten. Emily and Mary would watch the little ones and let them doze off for brief periods of time, rousing them when they heard the keepers approach.

  This 1863 lithograph by Henry Louis Stephens depicts a slave being whipped. Beatings often ranged from 10 to 40 lashes, sometimes more. A pregnant woman would be forced to lie facedown with her abdomen in a pit so that she could be whipped without injury to the baby.

  While most punishments were not designed to kill, in the New Orleans pen, the girls learned of two people—a woman and a young boy—who were whipped to death. Emily did not know how she was going to survive the ongoing abuse. In times of despair, other slaves found themselves almost envying those who had died: In death, they had at last found freedom; their suffering had ended.

  The Second Wife

  In New Orleans, attractive black women, both free and enslaved, were sometimes chosen as mistresses or second wives by wealthy French, Spanish, and Creole men. Through a social system known as placage, these men would take a woman of color as a secret common-law wife and separate their time between their two homes and families: one white, the other black; one public, the other private.

  The women in these arrangements were not legally recognized as wives; they were known as placées, from the French word placer, meaning “to place with.” Some women became placées voluntarily, if they were chosen by partners at so-called quadroon balls, formal dances where white men met fair-skinned women of color.

  Many of these mixed-race families lived in neighborhoods not far from the slave pen where the Edmonsons were held.

  “Creole women of color taking the air,” an 1867 watercolor painting by Edouard Marquis. While these women would have been free in 1867, the placage system of “left-handed marriages” was well-established at the time the Edmonsons were in New Orleans.

  TEN

  An Unexpected Reunion

  RICHARD EDMONSON ARRIVED in New Orleans a free man. He had to wait for weeks for his return voyage to Baltimore, so he decided to try to locate his older brother, Hamilton, the oldest of the 14 Edmonson children. Hamilton had run away from his owner’s house in Washington, D.C., on July 1, 1833. The only information Richard had was that his brother had been captured and sold at auction in New Orleans, destined to work in the cotton fields. Sixteen years had passed;
Richard had no reason to believe he would ever find out what happened to Hamilton.

  Richard interviewed every willing black person he encountered. He went from shop to shop, asking for information about a slave meeting Hamilton’s description coming from Washington 16 years before. After several days of searching, Richard wandered into a cooper shop at 121 Girard Street in New Orleans. Although they had grown up together, Richard did not recognize the store owner at first. After several questions, however, it became clear that Richard had found his oldest brother.

  As they became reacquainted, Hamilton told Richard of his experiences as a southern slave. After spending years on a cotton plantation, Hamilton was sold again and given the last name of his new owner, Taylor. Hamilton Taylor became a cooper, a skilled tradesman who made barrels. While not a common practice, Hamilton’s owner allowed him to keep a portion of his wages to encourage loyalty and to reduce the risk that he would run away. In time, Hamilton had saved enough money to buy his freedom for $1,000. As a free man, Hamilton started his own business making barrels near the shipping yard.

  After 16 years away, Hamilton was eager to see the other members of his family. Mary had been a baby when Hamilton last saw her and Emily had not been born. Richard told Hamilton about his other siblings: Their five older sisters—Elizabeth, Eveline, Martha, Henrietta, and Eliza—were free, having purchased their freedom or married men who secured their freedom before the weddings. Their owner refused to sell any of the others because he depended on the steady income he received from hiring them out. The six who ran away on the Pearl—Emily, Mary, and their four brothers—had worked as domestic slaves before escaping. The two youngest, Josiah and Louisa, remained at home with their parents because they were still too young to be hired out. When he left the Culvers’, Hamilton never expected to see his family again; now somehow Richard had found him. They had been given a second chance at brotherhood.