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. . . the oldest planters
of Jamaica are convinced, that it is cheaper to pay
wages, than to own the slave. —Ralph Waldo Emerson
Literature functions as a cultural vehicle through which tradition
and history may be passed from generation to generation. The history
of chattel slavery in the United States, the “peculiar institution,”
is embedded in the American literature of the antebellum period. During
that era, writers recorded factual accounts, as well as fictional interpretations
that exhibit their views and the views of others, as to the morality
and financial feasibility of chattel slavery. These diverse writings
create a looking glass through which we can peer into the economic and
social conditions of that era. Historical accounts of slavery—researched
and recorded by historians such as Eugene D. Genovese, Kenneth M. Stampp,
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, and Ulrich Bonnell Phillips—lend credence
to the accuracy of the first-hand slave accounts and narratives, such
as those compiled by John W. Blassingame, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick
Douglass, and to oral presentations that have been preserved as antebellum
American literature. These literary depictions of the slave-based plantation
system of the antebellum American South reveal that the system was on
a path to financial self-destruction, especially during the twenty-year
period immediately preceding the onset of the Civil War. Historical
accounts, slave narratives, public speeches, novels, and personal testimonies
such as letters and interviews, reveal that the political, commercial,
and social systems that supported that institution were deteriorating,
and this body of literature provides insight into the splintering ideologies
that had previously justified chattel slavery.
Eugene D. Genovese is recognized as one of the world’s premier
historiographers of American slavery. His work, along with that of historians
Blassingame, Phillips, Stampp, and Fox-Genovese, attests to the factual
accuracy depicted in the literature of that time concerning the economic
implications of slavery in the South. Although each of these historians
presents his/her own view of the economic status of the antebellum South,
factual examples from varied literary works support the view that slavery
was not a profitable enterprise.
Presenting an opposing perspective, Robert William Fogel and Stanley
L. Engerman, well known American historical economists, charge that
the antebellum economy thrived and prospered under the patriarchal plantation
system. In their book, Time on the Cross, published in 1974, Fogel and
Engerman claim: “There is no evidence that economic forces alone
would have soon brought slavery to an end without the necessity of a
war or some other form of political intervention. Quite the contrary;
as the Civil War approached, slavery as an economic system was never
stronger and the trend was toward even further entrenchment” (5).
In many cases, however, antebellum writers present a clearer, more pointed
argument against the profitability of slavery. Through the literary
illumination of views, perceptions, narratives, and events concerning
the institution of chattel slavery in various texts, I plan to prove
that antebellum writers foretell the economic dissipation of the slave-based
plantation system irrespective of the impending Civil War.
The Political and Moral Justification of the South’s Slave-Based
Economic System
The antebellum South is unique as compared to any other time period
in the history of the United States. During this time, millions of enslaved
blacks created a work force designed to support a “capitalist
agrarian” economic system (Genovese, Political 13). Within this
system, slaveholders and plantation owners rose to power as an elite,
governing body. By the 1850s, antebellum plantations encompassed millions
of acres of land in the Southern states, and in 1860, U. B. Phillips
reports that “the number of persons ow[n]ing ten slaves or more
was returned at 107,957 in a total white population in the Southern
states of 8,099,760 souls” (Slave Economy 138). The social system
of the time was stratified to create three very separate classes: an
aristocracy, a poor white working class, and black slaves, a segment
of the population who, on one hand, were not considered to be citizens
and were owned as property, but yet they were counted as three-fifths
of a person for census counting. Since slaves could not vote, the “three-fifths
compromise” was put into effect to “augment the size and
power of the southern bloc in the U. S. House of Representatives”
(Gates 131).
In the eyes of the aristocracy, it was necessary for these social classes
to remain suitably separated so that the patriarchal Southern lifestyle
could be continued without interference. In order for this civic chasm
to be perpetuated, information provided to the literate masses, in the
form of proslavery “propaganda,” reinforced popular opinion
that chattel slavery was, as proposed by Senator John C. Calhoun in
his 1837 address to Congress, “a positive good” (Calhoun
373). Proslavery literature was thus developed and distributed to assure
that the “peculiar institution” would continue to be fostered
by Southern society. A largely religious population, some white Southerners
needed reassurance that the slave-based workforce that drove their economy
was morally, biologically, and ethically justified by the Bible and
current medical evidence. Many Southerners were quite satisfied by the
writings and orations of “learned” religious and scientific
men who could justify the enslavement of millions of people based solely
on the difference of race and skin color, even to the distinction of
one drop of black blood. F. James Davis, historian, describes this qualifier
as “the one drop rule,” “the black ancestor rule,”
or “the traceable amount rule.” Davis claims that “State
courts have generally upheld the one drop rule, but some have limited
the definition to one thirty-second or one-sixteenth, or one-eight black
ancestry, or made other limited exceptions for persons with both Indian
and black ancestry” (Davis).
In order to justify chattel slavery, many proslavery authors penned
articles and orations designed to prove to Southern society that the
black race was inferior. Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Cartwright, George
Fitzhugh, and Nehemiah Adams published proslavery works intended to
justify slavery to specific audiences. Interestingly, within the written
arguments and historical situation of these proslavery authors lies
confirmation of the increasing financial difficulties suffered by the
planters.
Thomas Jefferson, as governor of Virginia, wrote Notes on the State
of Virginia in 1785 in response to queries about his state from the
Marquis de Barbé-Marbois, then serving as secretary to the French
legation in Philadelphia. According to Robert S. Levine, “the
main purpose of the text was to refute Europe’s leading naturalists,
Abbé Reynal and the Count de Buffon, who had argued that the
New World showed signs of physical and natural degeneration” (Levine
335). Levine also notes that “As he became more economically dependent on his slaves, Jefferson became more of
a defender of the South’s right to own slaves for the time being”
(Levine 335). Joseph Ellis, a Jefferson historian, reports that Jefferson
“owned approximately 600 slave persons . . . And his lifestyle,
his standard of living itself at Monticello, were all dependent upon
the institution of slavery” (Ellis). Ellis adds that “It
was an ironic form of dependence, because he went bankrupt, as did a
significant percentage of the planter class in Virginia, in the late
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Slavery in Virginia was not working
as an economic institution” (Ellis). Jefferson’s Notes is
prejudicial to slavery and contains blatant racist references to the
differences between the races such as, “they [the blacks] seem
to require less sleep” and “a black after hard labour through
the day, will be induced by the slightest amusements to sit up till
midnight or later, though knowing he must be out with the first dawn
of the morning. They are at least as brave, and more adventuresome.
But this may perhaps proceed from a want of forethought, which prevents
their seeing a danger till it be present.” Jefferson (in what
today could be considered an eerily revealing statement in light of
recent DNA evidence that established Jefferson’s sexual relationship
with his slave Sally Hemings) states, “The improvement of the
blacks in body and mind, in the first instance of their mixture with
the whites, has been observed by every one, and proves that their inferiority
is not the effect merely of their condition of life” (Jefferson
340).
In claiming blacks’ inferiority, Jefferson intends to defend chattel
slavery to critics who view the system from outside the United States.
His defensive retort was necessary, as Levine describes, to quell European
suspicions of a “physical and natural degeneration” occurring
in his country. Therefore, it is evident through Jefferson’s reply
to Barbé-Marbois that, as early as 1785, observers from outside
the continental United States were aware of the South’s economic
difficulties, and that the governor felt that it was necessary to defend
a system on which he, as a planter, had become dependent. Early on,
Southern leaders realized that increasing foreign political opposition
to the institution of slavery threatened the economy on which the planter
depended.
A respected New Orleans physician and race theorist, Samuel Cartwright
published “Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race”
in 1851. Cartwright’s four-part essay contained information that
was intended to “help masters better manage their slaves”
by means of identifying and explaining the effects of diseases and peculiarities
common to the black race. Cartwright presented his theory in De Bow’s
Review, which Levine describes as a “publication devoted to the
promotion of Southern commerce” (390). De Bow’s was published
in New Orleans from 1846–1861 (Levine 390). Cartwright developed
his hypothesis to explain the propensity of slaves to flee their “situation”
repeatedly. He refers to blacks as “a species different from whites,”
as he contends that blacks possess a tendency for mysterious illnesses
and conditions that causes them to avoid their work and to attempt escape
from their owners:
Dysaesthesia Aethiopica is a disease peculiar to Negroes, affecting
both mind and body in a manner as well expressed by dysaesthesia, the
name I have given it, as could be by a single term. There is both mind
and sensibility, but both seem to be difficult to reach by impressions
from without. There is a partial insensibility of the skin, and so great
a hebetude of the intellectual faculties, as to be like a person half
asleep, that is with difficulty aroused and kept awake. . . . From the
careless movements of the individuals affected with the complaint, they
are apt to do much mischief, which appears as if intentional, but is
mostly owing to the stupidness of mind and insensibility of the nerves
induced by the disease. Thus, they break, waste and destroy everything
they handle,—abuse horses and cattle,—tear, burn or rend
their own clothing, and, paying no attention to the rights of property,
steal others, to replace what they have destroyed (Cartwright 390–91).
Cartwright continues by noting that the “Negro” seems to
be “insensitive to pain when punished” and functions almost
like an “automaton or senseless machine” (Cartwright 390–91).
In this sampling of Cartwright’s propaganda, it is evident that
the writer attempts to explain many of the plantation owner’s
financial operating woes by casting blame on the slave. According to
this theory, because of this “desensitizing disease,” slaves
wrecked equipment, injured livestock, and destroyed their own clothing.
He thus asserts that the slaves themselves (because of their racial
“peculiarities”) were responsible for many of the financial
losses occurring on the plantations. In Cartwright’s own words,
due to behavioral oddities restricted to the black race, the management
of slave labor is portrayed as ruinous for plantation owners, to say
the least. The publication of Cartwright’s essay in an influential
journal such as De Bow’s supports the contention that the financial
problems of maintaining slaves occurred because of problems intrinsic
to the plantation system.
In addition to providing excuses for economic mismanagement by the slaveowners,
Cartwright’s theory determined that members of the black race
were not as “human” as whites. Because Cartwright portrays
blacks as “desensitized,” the mistreatment and torturous
punishment of slaves, which usually resulted from misbehavior, was considered
justifiable, ethical, and necessary. The New Testament of the Christian
Bible (Colossians 3:11) supports the American ideal, stated in the Declaration
of Independence, that “All men are created equal.” However,
in Cartwright’s Southern view of humanity, all men are created
equal—who are created white. If a person is not white, according
to Cartwright’s proposed philosophy, he/she is exempt from scriptural
inclusion and protection. In The Slaveholders’ Dilemma, Eugene
D. Genovese quotes John Adger, a proslavery antebellum writer, “It
is a mistake . . . to believe that because rights are natural they must
be accorded to all human beings: ‘The rights of a father are natural,
but they belong only to the fathers. Rights of property are natural,
but they belong only to those who have property.’ Men have . .
. an equal and perfect right to the rights and privileges of the status
to which they have been assigned” (Genovese, Slaveholders’
53).
Another proslavery view is espoused by George Fitzhugh, a lawyer and
small plantation owner from Virginia, who presents his own proslavery
theories in Sociology for the South (1854) and in his widely-read book,
Cannibals All! (1857). Recognized as one of the South’s most influential
proslavery writers, Fitzhugh defends the South’s economic system
by contrasting it to the North’s “free” market society.
Fitzhugh proposes that the institution of slavery imparts a natural
and positive good that is preferable to the “wage slave”
system adopted by the North. Fitzhugh proposes, “It never occurred
to either the enemies or the apologists for slavery that if no one would
employ the free laborer, his condition was infinitely worse than that
of actual slavery—nor did it occur to them that if his wage were
less than the allowance of the slave, he was less free after emancipation
than before” (Fitzhugh, Cannibals 21). He defends the hierarchy
of the South’s aristocratic social class by claiming that:
All cannot be rich. The rich and the poor change places oftener [in
the North] than where there are fixed hereditary distinctions; so often
that the sense of insecurity makes every one unhappy; so often, that
we see men clutching at security through means of Odd Fellows, Temperance
Societies, &c., which provide for members; so often, that almost
every State in the Union has of late years enacted laws or countenanced
decisions giving more permanency to property. (Fitzhugh, Sociology 399)
In Cannibals All! Fitzhugh supports his claim that a slave-based economic
system is morally and economically justified by quoting from Jerrold’s
Magazine, a British publication, which called for the implementation
of slavery as a remedy to England’s “poor peasant”
problem. The author (identified only as “A Philanthropist”)
notes the devastating effects of famine and pestilence on the poor of
England. In heart-wrenching accounts of death and destruction amongst
the poor in times of national distress, the author proposes that the
poor would be in a better condition if enslaved by a wealthy master.
He contends, “If, indeed, the old noble cry of ‘Liberty
and Beer’ could be realized, then it were vain to urge my discovery;
but as Englishmen, in proportion as they have gained their liberty,
have lost their beer, it behooves us to see whether they had not better
hasten back to that state when inventoried with their master’s
swine they shared also their superfluities” (qtd. in Fitzhugh,
Cannibals 157).
Similarly, Fitzhugh supports his own defense of the benefits of slavery
by claiming that the Southern slaveholder:
provides for each slave, in old age and in infancy, in sickness and
in health, not according to his labor, but according to his wants. The
master’s wants are more costly and refined, and he therefore gets
a larger share of the profits. A Southern farm is the beau ideal of
Communism; it is a joint concern, in which the slave consumes more than
the master, of the coarse products, and is far happier, because although
the concern may fail, he is always sure of a support; he is only transferred
to another master to participate in the profits of another concern.
(Fitzhugh, Sociology 399)
Fitzhugh’s picture of slavery depicts a paternalistic society
where every slave is well cared for and healthy, where slaves are happy
to be free from the worries of self-support and where each slave is
a communal partner who reaps the benefits of the harvest alongside his
master. Interestingly, Fitzhugh mentions the possibility that the ideal
“concern” might fail. If the plantation fails, Fitzhugh
adds that the slave would be “transferred” to another owner.
While admitting the uncertain viability of the plantation, the writer
simplifies the horrifying sale of slaves as a “transfer”
of property between masters. He is describing the sale of slaves as
a means of liquidating plantation capital. In the event of financial
need or bankruptcy, planters often sold slaves to raise money and to
settle debts. Here again, Fitzhugh’s own words confirm the financial
stresses of slave owning, and reveal the ways in which planters were
being forced by a falling economic market to turn property to cash.
To Southern Christian planters, it was important to rally support from
religious leaders to justify slave labor. Northern abolitionist forces
were working to expose the horrors of slavery to the world; therefore,
support from someone such as Nehemiah Adams did much to further the
planters’ views on chattel slavery. Adams, a Northern minister,
concurred with the Southern philosophy as to the benefits of slavery
to the slaves. His 1854 publication, A South-Side View of Slavery, was
intended to rebut the claims of Northern abolitionists who contended
that slavery perpetrated the unjust and barbaric treatment of men and
women who were enslaved against their will for the betterment of Southern
society. Adams maintains that slavery is necessary to the nation’s
economy. He decries abolitionist writers who detest the separation of
the black family through the selling of men, women, and children as
property. Adams contends:
It seems to be taken for granted that to be sold is inevitably to pass
from a good to an inferior condition. This is as much a mistake as it
would be to assert the same of changes on the part of domestic servants
in the free States. There are as good masters as those whose death makes
it necessary to scatter the slaves of an estate. The change itself is
not necessarily an evil. . . . We must remember that slaves are not
the only inhabitants, nor slave families the only families, in the land,
that are scattered by the death of others. . . . In the mean time, public
sentiment is fast correcting abuses under the system; and not only so,
but through its individuals among the slaves is becoming here and there
as free from evil as human nature permits in a dependent condition (404–05).
Adams, like Fitzhugh, paints slavery as a benign institution that
benefits the slave as well as the slaveholder. His tunnel-vision view
of the sale of slaves as property denies the multitude of other reasons
that slaves were put on the auction block. The sale of slaves occurred
for many reasons other than the death of a planter. Adams’ testimony
as to the humane state of slavery in the South, however, was weighty
evidence given his status as a Congregationalist minister, a Northerner,
and a recent visitor to the South. In addition to the weight of Adams’
opinion, the fact that it was published in 1854 was important as well.
At this time, abolitionist views were quickly taking root and spreading
from the North into the South. The South desperately needed to gather
support from Northern leaders such as Adams in their bid to maintain
their way of life. Trade and commerce between North and South were beginning
to be affected by differing opinions concerning slavery. As their economic
interests became increasingly unstable, planters began to blame their
neighbors to the North for what they perceived to be personal attacks
on their way of life. Kenneth Stampp in The Imperiled Union describes
a theory of progressive historian Charles A. Beard as he reports: “Spokesmen
for the planters charged that their northern economic rivals had organized
politically to plunder the agricultural interest, while northern entrepreneurs
viewed the planters as ‘a huge, compact, and self-conscious economic
association bent upon . . . the possession of the government’
for the aggrandizement of their class” (197).
Accusations such as those made by the planters’ spokesmen sparked
fictional accounts written in defense of slavery. Works of this kind
answered abolitionist charges through literary retort. Novelist Caroline
Lee Hentz was Northern-born and a member of the same literary society,
the Semi-Colon Club, as Harriet Beecher Stowe. But in 1834, Hentz married
and moved to Alabama. She was known as an author of domestic novels
and “was seemingly unconcerned with issues of slavery and race”
(Levine 405). Following her move to the South, however, Hentz wrote
in 1854, The Planter’s Northern Bride, a proslavery novel, in
response to Stowe’s best-selling abolitionist Uncle Tom’s
Cabin. In her novel, Hentz describes a situation where slaveowner Moreland
reprimands his slaves as he accuses the local minister, Rev. Mr. Brainard,
of inspiring an insurrection. Moreland cries:
I pity you; for I sent the wretch in your midst, believing him to be
a man of God. He has beguiled you with promises of freedom. What is
the freedom he can offer you? Nothing but poverty, degredation, and
sorrow. If you could compare your condition with those of the free coloured
people at the North, you would shudder to think of all that you have
escaped. Listen! You are slaves, and I am free; but I neither made you
slaves nor myself a free man. We are all in the condition in which we
were born. You are black, and I am white; but I did not give you those
sable skins, nor myself this fairer complexion. You and I are as God
Almighty made us, and, as I expect to give an account of the manner
in which I fulfil my duties as a master, so you will be judged according
to your fidelity, honesty, and uprightness as servants. (Hentz 408)
Moreland’s pious lecture continues to justify slavery through
scriptural references, and Hentz reveals in the conclusion of the novel
that the revolutionary Rev. Brainard is deceitful and untrustworthy
(Hentz 406). By creating an upstanding Christian slaveowner hero and
a delusive and false abolitionist minister villain, Hentz promotes slavery
as a misunderstood necessity—a necessity for the slave and the
slaveowner. Without the slave, the planter would be unable to maintain
his plantation and harvest his crops. And without the slaveowner, contends
Hentz, the slave would be like a starving orphan unable to care for
himself. Proslavery advocates feared that if public opinion began to
adopt abolitionist theories, the planters would risk losing the massive
labor force available to them. However, Hentz’s novel, like Fitzhugh’s
Sociology, documents that the slaveowner was expected to take care of
his slaves’ needs. In reality, the slaveowners’ responsibility
was not always fulfilled, a fact frequently noted in the firsthand testimonies
of former slaves.
The High Cost of Slaveowning
Fogel and Engerman claim: “The belief that the typical slave was
poorly fed is without foundation in fact. This mistaken view may have
arisen from a misinterpretation of the instructions of masters to their
overseers” (Fogel 109–10). They argue that the energy value
of the slaves’ diet “exceeded that of free men in 1879 by
more than 10 percent” (113). Interestingly, Fogel and Engerman
fail to compare the expended energy of a plantation field slave to the
“free men” of their study.
Published in 1956, Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution, like Fogel
and Engerman’s work, presents a view of slavery as a profitable
institution. Although Stampp concludes: “In the final analysis,
the high valuation of Negro labor during the 1850’s was the best
and most direct evidence of the continued profitability of slavery,”
he admits, “By far, the master’s greatest expense was the
support of his labor force” (Peculiar 406). While Stampp declares
that slavery was indeed profitable, the pages of his own book contain
factual evidence of the overwhelming financial burden of slaveowning.
Stampp’s depiction of the high cost of slaveowning supports the
possibility for allegations of inadequate care made by former slaves
such as Frederick Douglass:
Expenditures for food, clothing, shelter, and medical care were, in
a sense, the wages paid a slave for his labor; but the master usually
thought of them as maintenance costs—expenditures necessary for
the upkeep of slave property. How much he spent for these necessities,
the quality and quantity he believed essential, depended upon a number
of things. First, it depended upon how well informed the master was
upon such subjects as diet, hygiene, and the causes and treatment of
disease. Even a well-intentioned master could, from sheer ignorance,
cause his bondsman much misery. (Peculiar 280)
Frederick Douglass, a fugitive slave and famous anti-slavery orator
and best-selling author, penned some of the most poignant examples of
“slave” life. His Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,
published in 1845, points out the implications of withholding food from
a slave:
Not to give a slave enough to eat, is regarded as the most aggravated
development of meanness even among the slaveholders. The rule is, no
matter how coarse the food, only let there be enough of it . . . Master
Thomas gave us enough of neither coarse nor fine food. There were four
slaves of us in the kitchen—my sister Eliza, my aunt Priscilla,
Henny, and myself; and we were allowed less than a half of a bushel
of corn-meal per week, and very little else, either in the shape of
meat or vegetables. (Douglass, Narrative 63)
Minimal care for a number of slaves (such as thirty or forty on a
small plantation) would have been a costly burden on the slaveowner;
however, proper care for a great number (such as one hundred or more
on a larger plantation) posed an even greater expense to the plantation.
Because of the high cost of adequate care, many slaves were underfed
and malnourished. Genovese explains, “The slave usually got enough
to eat, but the starchy, high-energy diet of cornmeal, pork, and molasses
produced specific hungers, dangerous deficiencies, and that unidentified
form of malnutrition to which the medical historian Richard H. Shryock
draws attention” (Political 44). Genovese acknowledges the nutrient
deficiencies in the slaves’ diet, but his phrase, “enough
to eat” is also misleading. “Enough” suggests that
the slaves’ hunger was satisfied, and there is much indication
within the slaves’ testimonies to prove otherwise. Genovese adds,
“Planters did try to provide vegetables and fruits, but not much
land could be spared from the staples, and output remained minimal”
(Political 44–45). In an interview conducted with escaped slaves
in South Carolina in 1861, published in the Anti-Slavery Advocate (1
February 1962), the interviewer claims, “I have invariably been
told by the negroes that they were not well fed. The first reason a
black man, or woman, or child assigns for deserting his owner is the
small quantity and poor quality of food given him; the next reason is
the same story about clothing; then comes the complaint of hard usage,
hard work, and occasionally of cruelty” (Blassingame 359). The
testimonies of Douglass and the escaped South Carolinian slaves characterize
the lack of nourishment provided to many slaves. These attestations
prove that by the mid nineteenth century, planters were unable (or unwilling
because of the high cost) to maintain their own slaves. These nutritional
deficiencies in turn hindered agricultural production and caused malaise
among slaves.
Food was not the only great expense of slaveowning. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’s
Within the Plantation Household provides an example of the large quantities
of yard goods needed to clothe slaves as she quotes Katherine DuPre
Lumpkin’s description of her grandfather’s plantation and
its workings: “Clothing the slaves alone required hauling in bolts
of goods from Athens or Augusta. The garments then had to be made for
men, women and children. . . . There was the mending also. Altogether
the sewing could probably keep a few women busy practically all of every
day” (103). Francis Henderson, who escaped from plantation slavery
in 1841, is quoted by Steven Mintz: “In the summer we had one
pair of linen trousers given us—nothing else; every fall, one
pair of woolen pantaloons, one woolen jacket, and two cotton shirts”
(99). Henderson’s comment on the lack of adequate clothing for
slaves attests to the high cost of slave labor.
On the plantation, food and clothing for the slaves were costly provisions;
however, other necessities such as medical care were often neglected
entirely because of their high cost. Stampp quotes a Tennessee slaveowner
concerning the cost of medical care for his slaves: “My medical
bill for 1845 is $50.00 for about 50 persons—it has been a very
sickly year” (Peculiar 406). Substandard treatment was often substituted
for costly medical care for the ailing slaves as planters looked for
ways to cut maintenance costs. Stampp notes: “Though some slaveholders
spared neither time nor expense in ministering to their ‘people,’
others were guilty of astonishing neglect . . . Indeed, economic self-interest
did not always impel a calloused master to give medical aid to an ailing
slave, for it might tempt him to withhold this aid either because the
case seemed hopeless or because the slave was worthless” (Stampp,
Peculiar 314). Fogel and Engermann claim that “it was generally
the intent of planters to supply slaves with medical care of a relatively
high quality [however, that] does not imply that the objective was usually
realized” (120). The writers insist that the inadequacies of medical
care were due to the “state of medical knowledge” and the
“prevailing theory of disease” and not to any failure on
the planters’ part (120–21).
Slaves often provided medical treatment for other slaves. Fogel and
Engerman admit that “Few plantations were large enough to justify
the exclusive retention of a full-time physician. However, virtually
all plantations of moderate or large size had at least one full-time
nurse, usually an elderly slave” (120). Antebellum literature
depicts this type of substandard medical care provided to slaves on
some plantations. William Wells Brown’s Clotel; or, The President’s
Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States, published
in 1853, is considered to be the first novel by an African American.
Written in London while Brown was still a fugitive slave, Clotel is
reportedly based on real events (Levine 3). One of Clotel’s chapters,
“A Night in the Parson’s Kitchen,” tells of a slave,
Sam the “Black Doctor,” who learned the arts of “bleeding,
pulling teeth, and administering medicine to the slaves” from
his former master, a white physician (Brown 137). The quackery of such
“doctors” is described in Brown’s humorous account
of Sam’s removal of a “patient’s” tooth:
We once saw Sam taking out a tooth for one of his patients, and nothing
appeared more amusing. He got the poor fellow down on his back, and
he got a straddle of the man’s chest, and getting the turnkeys
on the wrong tooth, he shut both eyes and pulled for his life. The poor
man screamed as loud as he could, but to no purpose. Sam had him fast.
After a great effort, out came the sound grinder, and the young doctor
saw his mistake; but consoled himself with the idea that as the wrong
tooth was out of the way, there was more room to get at the right one.
(Brown 137)
Although probably intended to be amusing, Brown’s tale nevertheless
attests to the fact that slaves were often subject to grossly deficient
medical and dental care that resulted in further injury or illness to
the “patient.”
Low Productivity and Mismanagement
Approaching the mid nineteenth century, the slaveholders faced increasing
economic hardships in addition to the problem of providing basic care
for slaves. Mismanagement and the poor treatment of slaves resulted
in low productivity. Low productivity threatened the plantation economy
as prices for staple crops such as cotton, tobacco, and corn fluctuated
greatly in the years just preceding the Civil War. High productivity
was imperative to the planters, because as operating costs soared, increased
income was necessary to maintain the plantations’ viability. In
their efforts to increase productivity, planters often used methods
of operation that proved counterproductive, such as providing inferior
care for slaves and using methods of coercion and punishment that actually
impeded the slaves in the course of their work. “The slave’s
low productivity resulted directly from inadequate care, incentives,
and training, and from such other well known factors as the overseer
system,” claims Genovese (Political 46).
The actual day-to-day operations of the plantation (including agricultural
practices and the management of slave labor) were often directed by
someone other than the plantation owner. A plantation manager, or overseer,
was expected to insure production profitability. Ulrich Bonnell Phillips,
an early historian (the bulk of whose work was published around the
turn of the twentieth century) proposed a theory supporting the perpetuation
of slavery in the South as he stressed, “the presence of an inferior
race, undisciplined to sustained labor” (Genovese, “Introduction,”
Slave Economy ix). Phillips describes the expectations that a planter
may have had in procuring an overseer: “A man who is able to manage
a small farm to advantage is usually able also to superintend the labor
of others in his line of work. Wages of efficient superintendence are
always much higher than the wages of mere labor” (Phillips, Slave
Economy 66). Some planters hired whites for the position of overseer
due to racist perceptions of the time such as those articulated by Samuel
A. Cartwright: “When left to himself, the Negro indulges in his
natural disposition to idleness and sloth, and does not take exercise
enough to expand his lungs and to vitalize his blood . . . having too
little energy of mind to provide for himself proper food and comfortable
lodging and clothing” (392). Phillips notes, “The average
Negro cannot maintain himself as an independent farmer, because his
ignorance, indolence, and instability prevent him from managing his
own labor in an efficient way” (67). Although Phillips’
racist views taint his historical writings, his clear and direct factual
accounts nonetheless provide verification of the financial problems
faced by planters in managing their agricultural concerns.
Overseers assumed a great deal of responsibility, and too often handled
their duties poorly. Stampp contends that “a Mississippi planter
warned his overseer ‘that a failure to make a bountiful supply
of corn and meat for the use of the plantation will be considered as
notice that his services will not be required for the succeeding year’”
(Peculiar 51). Stampp adds, “The average planter, however, was
tempted to forgive a great deal if his overseer managed to make enough
cotton” (Peculiar 51). Overseers soon realized that high productivity
would amount to job security for them. An overseer’s quest for
high crop production often resulted in the reckless deterioration of
the planter’s property—land and chattel. However, Fogel
and Engermann contend that “the continual discussions of problems
of plantation management in the agricultural journals of the South were
not evidence of the failure of southern planters but of the earnestness
with which they approached their tasks” (201). “Earnestness”
may be the writers’ misnomer for the South’s method of mismanagement
and abuse of managerial power, which became the plantations’ greatest
ill. Substantiation of this type of abuse abounds in the literary works
published in the mid nineteenth century.
Stories of slave abuse were published and promoted by the members of
the abolitionist movement and stood as glaring evidence of the mismanagement
by planters and overseers of the slave work force. The most famous and
best-selling slave narrative is the autobiography of Frederick Douglass
who escaped from slavery in Maryland and came to New York in 1838 and
became one of the most influential African Americans in the abolitionist
movement. In Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, the former
slave recalls his treatment by an overseer, Mr. Covey, when he becomes
ill and is unable to perform his work. Douglass writes:
He came to the spot, and, after looking at me awhile, asked me what
was the matter. I told him as well as I could, for I scarce had strength
to speak. He then gave me a savage kick in the side, and told me to
get up. I tried to do so, but fell back in the attempt. He gave me another
kick, and again told me to rise. I again tried, and succeeded in gaining
my feet; but, stooping to get the tub with which I was feeding the fan,
I again staggered and fell. While down in this situation, Mr. Covey
took up the half-bushel measure, and with it gave me a heavy blow upon
the head, making a large wound, and the blood ran freely; and with this
again told me to get up. I made no effort to comply, having now made
up my mind to let him do his worst (47).
As Douglass and others testify, abusive treatment in the fields and
impeding apparatuses were used as a means of punishment for low productivity
and “unwillingness.” These torturous methods greatly hindered
the production ability of the slave. Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents
in the Life of a Slave Girl, written between 1853 and 1858, describes
the punishment inflicted on an “unwilling” plantation field
slave, “The whip is used till the blood flows at his feet; and
his stiffened limbs are put in chains, to be dragged in the field for
days and days!” (17).
Published in 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
an abolitionist novel, narrates one of history’s most famous overseers/owners
in literature, Simon Legree. Legree was proud of his ability to keep
his “niggers” “toe[ing] the mark” (484). Legree
describes his recipe for dealing with slaves to a stranger while on
his way home from purchasing Tom, Emmeline, and others. The stranger,
interested in the length of expected usefulness of a field slave, asks
Legree, “And how long do they generally last?”
Legree replies: Well, donno; ‘cordin’ as their constitution
is. Stout fellers last six or seven years; trashy ones gets worked up
in two or three. I used to, when I fust begun, have considerable trouble
fussin’ with ‘em and trying to make ‘em hold out,—doctorin’
on ‘em up when they’s sick, and givin’ on ‘em
clothes and blankets, and what not, tryin’ to keep ‘em all
sort o’ decent and comfortable. Law, ‘t wasn’t no
sort o’ use; I lost money on ‘em, and ‘t was heaps
o’ trouble. Now, you see, I just put ‘em straight through,
sick or well. When one nigger’s dead, I buy another; and I find
it comes cheaper and easier, every way (485).
In response to Legree’s reply, the stranger turns to another
and predicts the demise of the entire slave system if all planters function
as Legree does: “in my opinion, it is you considerate, humane
men, that are responsible for all the brutality and outrage wrought
by these wretches; because, if it were not for your sanction and influence,
the whole system could not keep foothold for an hour” (485). Stowe
uses Legree’s character to engrave the image of the brutal overseer
in her reader’s minds. The type and style of speech used by Legree
paints Stowe’s verbal picture of the mentality of a slave “driver.”
The term “slave driver” is used today to describe a relentless
taskmaster who never grants his subjects rest. Fictional characters
like Stowe’s Legree have no doubt done much to establish that
image. Stowe, in addition, presents another facet of plantation management:
the black slave “driver.” In truth, not all despotic plantation
officials were white. Slaves Sambo and Quimbo, Legree’s “principal
hands,” were trained in “savageness and brutality”
(492). Stowe describes the practice of using blacks as overseers: “It
is a common remark, and one that is thought to militate strongly against
the character of the race, that the Negro overseer is always more tyrannical
and cruel than the white one. This is simply saying that the Negro mind
has been more crushed and debased than the white” (492).
In 1841, Madison Jefferson, an escaped slave from Virginia, who was
interviewed in England by British and Foreign Slave Society presented
first-hand verification to support Stowe’s story: “In the
field the slaves worked by tasks under inspection of black drivers,
who were obliged to exact them, under fear of punishment themselves
by the white overseer” (Blassingame 219). Consequently, literary
embodiments of slaveowners like Legree strongly suggest that men of
his “type” truly existed in the antebellum South. Stowe’s
work thus illuminates the horrors of slavery and lends credence to claims
of mismanagement of the slave labor force.
Not all slaves were horrifically abused, and not all slaves suffered
under the hands of men like Legree. By comparing the productivity of
the field slave to the domestic slave, Phillips notes that the brutal
system of coercion used on slave labor was counterproductive: “Great
numbers of domestic servants were more stimulated by personal devotion
and pride of service than by fear of punishment.” He continues,
“Nevertheless, slave labor proved to be a type of labor peculiarly
unprofitable to its employers in a multitude of cases, and peculiarly
burdensome in the long run to nearly all the communities which maintained
the system” (137).
Agricultural mismanagement by inept plantation officials also resulted
in low productivity and poor agricultural practices that contributed
to the crumbling plantation economy. Phillips describes the changing
economic status of the South’s plantation system in this example:
Peter Baugh, of Talbotton, Georgia, wrote of his own experiences. .
. . In one of the boom years about 1820, he bought for $5,000 a tract
of land five times as large as he needed for cultivation, bought or
hired hands to work it who failed to earn their hire, and borrowed money
at 16 per cent to pay for provisions to feed his expensive laborers.
In 1824 he was forced to close out. His land sold for $1,600; a slave
for whom he had previously refused an offer of $1,100 brought $480.
After realizing on all his assets, Baugh says he started life anew with
a debt of $1,000 (147).
The rising demands of capitalism in the South created a tremendous
strain on the fertile soil of the plantations. Major crops such as corn,
tobacco, and cotton extracted nutrients from the ground at an alarming
rate. In addition, slaveowners bent on saving money substituted slaves
for livestock and equipment. An 1861 interview with Lavinia Bell, an
escaped slave from Texas, makes clear that slaves were used in place
of livestock for tilling and plowing fields. The interviewer records
Bell’s testimony:
She was sent into the cotton field with the other field hands, where
the treatment was cruelly severe. No clothes whatever were allowed them,
their hair was cut off close to their head, and thus were exposed to
the glare of a southern sun from early morn until late at night. Scarcely
a day passed without their receiving fifty lashes, whether they worked
or whether they did not. They were also compelled to go down on their
knees, and harnessed to a plough, to plough up the land, with boys for
riders, to whip them when they flagged in their work (Blassingame 342).
The absence of the “deep plowing” technique that required
equipment and the fertilizer produced by livestock caused fertile plantation
soil to gradually deteriorate over the years when slave labor was used
on the plantations. Fogel and Engerman portray the tilling and planting
technique used by slave “gangs”:
A planting gang consisted of five types of hands who followed one another
in a fixed procession. Leading off the procession were plowmen who ridged
up the unbroken earth; then came harrowers who broke up the clods; then
drillers who created the holes to receive the seeds, each hole a prescribed
distance apart from the next one; then droppers who planted the seeds
in the holes; and finally rakers who covered up the holes. (203)
Genovese reports, “In certain parts of the Upper South planters
solved the [soil maintenance] problem by selling some of their slaves
and transforming them into liquid capital with which to buy commercial
fertilizers” (Political 90). The application of barnyard manure
was costly for planters who did not maintain a sufficient number of
livestock to supply their fields with fertilizer. Genovese notes that
“Barnyard manure cost about two dollars per ton in Kentucky in
the 1850s, and the state geologist estimated that about four hundred
tons were needed to restore an exhausted acre” (Political 91).
Complicating the matter was the fact that in order for the planters
to maintain the required number of livestock for fertilizer needs, “half
the slave force would be required to give the animals the necessary
care” (Political 91). Genovese explains, “Slavery and the
plantation system led to agricultural methods that depleted the soil.
. . . The planters had too much land under cultivation; they lacked
the necessary livestock; they could practice crop rotation only with
difficulty; and they had to rely on a labor force of poor quality”
(Political 99). Stampp, however, disputes Genovese’s claim and
declares, “A major feature of the agricultural revival in ante-bellum
Virginia was an improved system of crop rotation with increased emphasis
upon corn, wheat, and clover” (Peculiar 51). Both historians do
agree that the effects of poor agricultural methods (those used by planters
who relied on slave labor, as in the case of Lavinia Bell) caused a
need for a “revival” of farming practices. Stampp specifies
the state of Virginia in his claim; therefore, he does not mention if
this type of “revival” was occurring in all of the Southern
slave-owning states.
Fogel and Engerman refute a series of essays written by Frederick Law
Olmstead, a New York farmer who traveled extensively from 1852–1854
throughout the South reporting on the plantation agricultural system
for the New York Times. Olmstead’s essays are reported by the
pair to have influenced historians such as: Karl Marx, W. E. B. Du Bois,
U. B. Phillips, and Kenneth Stampp, among others (Fogel and Engerman
170). Olmstead reported: “the poor quality of all southern labor
resulted in the wasting of resources: the natural fertility of land
was rapidly undermined; tools were frequently broken; livestock was
neglected; labor skills were allowed to decay; managerial skill was
scorned” (Fogel and Engerman 172). Fogel and Engerman claim that
Olmstead’s method of data collection was faulty because his visits
took place during the “slack season” and most of his information
was gathered by interviews with plantation owners, officials, and workers
and not by first-hand observations (174–76). The writers claim
that because of Olmstead’s research mistakes, erroneous assumptions
made by later historians resulted in an inaccurate view of plantation
profitability. However, the overwhelming majority of economists and
historians support the verity of antebellum literary works and slave
narratives that presented slavery’s doomed economic forecast.
Slave Auctions: A Planter’s Risky Pursuit of Able Bodies for Labor
The sale of slaves as a means of liquidating assets was an increasingly
common practice in the early nineteenth-century South. Frightening tales
of slave auctions, as well as private “transfers,” mark
the literature of the time, particularly in the form of personal narratives
and fictional representations. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe describes
one method of slave-selling referred to as a “slave warehouse.”
Stowe asserts: “Human property is high in the market; and is,
therefore, well fed, well cleaned, tended, and looked after, that it
may come to sale sleek, and strong, and shining.” Stowe relates
the call of the auction, “sold separately, or in lots to suit
the convenience of the purchaser” (467). Stowe’s depiction
of the slave auction also gives testimony to the deceptive practices
adopted by the sellers of slaves. Often, slaves would be disguised to
look younger, heavier and more able-bodied than they truly were. Stampp
alleges: “A numerous minority of masters contributed slaves to
the interstate trade under circumstances which their neighbors could
hardly have considered creditable. . . . Speculators were frequently
implicated with masters in covert or open attempts to dispose of ‘sickly’
slaves” (Peculiar 243).
In Clotel, Brown portrays this practice through the tricks of slave
trader Dick Walker in his bid to sell slaves for a profit. Brown attests,
“like most who make a business of buying and selling slaves for
gain, he often bought some who were far advanced in years, and would
always try to sell them for five or ten years younger than they actually
were” (89). Brown continues by describing a conversation between
Walker’s assistant Pompey and a slave:
“Well,” said Pompey, . . . “How old is you?”
addressing himself to a man who, from appearance, was not less than
forty. “If I live to see next corn-planting time I will either
be forty-five or fifty-five, I don’t know which.” “Dat
may be,” replied Pompey; “but now you is only thirty years
old; dat is what marser says you is to be.” . . . have off dem
dare whiskers of yours,” “an. . . grease dat face an make
it look shiny.” (90)
Depictions of slave sales and auctions are plentiful in antebellum
literature. The slave auction was an integral part of the domestic slave
trade during the mid nineteenth century; however, the very concept of
selling men, women, and children for labor was appalling to abolitionists,
and the idea of the sale of human flesh as property became a frequent
theme of abolitionist literature. The separation of families, often
a mother and her suckling infant, combined with the inhumane treatment
afforded slaves on the auction block offended antislavery proponents
as well as those who were previously indifferent to the institution
of slavery, causing them to reevaluate slavery and its practices. In
his 1853 novel, The Heroic Slave, Frederick Douglass depicts the horror
of Mr. Listwell at the sight of a “slave-gang on their way to
market” (40). Douglass himself had once been a slave at auction
following the death of his elderly mistress. Douglass’s sale (and
that of his grandmother) was carried out by strangers settling his mistress’s
estate. Douglass uses the character Listwell to describe the vicious
injustice inherent in the sale of slaves as property. Listwell claims:
Humanity converted into merchandise, and linked in iron bands, with
no regards to decency or humanity! All sizes, ages, and sexes, mothers,
fathers, daughters, brothers, sisters,—all huddled together, on
their way to market to be sold and separated from home, and from each
other forever. And all to fill the pockets of men too lazy to work for
an honest living, and who gain their fortune by plundering the helpless,
and trafficking in the souls and sinews of men. (Heroic 40–41).
Listwell’s observation illuminates abolitionist objections to
slave auctions. Through the eyes of Listwell, a white man, the abolitionist
reader is able identify with the character, and to perceive the cruel
injustices of a slave sale. Fictional works such as The Heroic Slave,
Clotel, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin gave their largely white audiences
a view of the horrors of slavery and promoted the cause of abolition.
These widely circulated novels reached readers in the North and South
and successfully infiltrated the culture in the form of abolitionist
literature. Uncle Tom’s Cabin illustrates this reality as Stowe
depicts a heart-wrenching scene where Mr. Shelby laments his decision
to sell Tom and Eliza’s child to slave trader Haley when he is
forced to settle plantation debts:
If anybody had ever said to me that I should sell Tom down south to
one of those rascally traders, I should have said, ‘Is thy servant
a dog, that he should do this thing?’ And now it must come, for
aught I see. And Eliza’s child, too! I know that I shall have
some fuss with wife about that; and, for that matter, about Tom, too.
So much for being in debt,—heighho! The fellow sees his advantage,
and means to push it (50).
Although horrific and inhumane, the slave auction was imperative to
the slave trade’s existence. Planters depended on the auction
system to replenish their labor force. The importance of healthy, able
slaves to the plantation system was so great that the frequent purchase
of new bodies was necessary, especially in light of the abusive treatment
and inadequate nutrition that was often afforded to the slave. Slave
prices in the states soared following the decision of the U. S. Congress
to outlaw the African slave trade in 1808. Phillips quotes the prices
of “an unskilled able-bodied field hand” to be between $1,200
and $1,800 per head from 1835 to 1860 (Phillips 138). Fogel and Engerman
add that “even among prime field hands (healthy males in the ages
eighteen to thirty), individual variations in strength, intelligence,
and energy created spreads in prices of several hundred dollars (54).
On larger plantations, much of a planter’s capital was in the
bodies of his slave force.
Plantation expenses climbed steadily as planters began to fear the stability
of their agricultural income. In the first half of the nineteenth century,
the market for staple crops fluctuated, and as Phillips notes, “The
plantation slave-labor regime, by force of circumstances which they
could not control, involved the planters in a severe competition with
one another in the purchase of labor and in the sale of crops. This
competition carried the price of labor so high and the price of the
staples so low that there tended to be no margin of real profits for
any but the greatest and most efficient planters” (138). Cotton
declined at a steady rate, and in 1846 the price for cotton “ranged
below even the record low prices of 1842,” notes Phillips (148).
Although cotton prices rose and fell in the following years, “dozens
of banks and thousands of planters were absolutely bankrupted, and even
some of the state governments were driven to repudiate their bonds,”
claims Phillips (148). Southern planters found the need to drive production
costs down in order to offset the falling market prices. The slave labor
force was forced to produce more on less. Slaves who could not produce
were of no use to the planter, yet Fogel and Engerman dismiss accusations
charging that elderly or disabled slaves were often considered disposable
property:
Earnings of sixty-five-year olds were still positive and on average,
brought an owner as much net income as a slave in the mid-teens. This
does not mean that every slave aged sixty-five produced a positive net
income for his owner. Some of the elderly were a net loss. However,
the income earned by the able-bodied among the elderly was more than
enough to compensate for the burden imposed by the incapacitated (74–75).
More often than Fogel and Engerman admit, slaves who were not physically
able to perform the most difficult of tasks were sent to auction, traded
in private deals, or worse. In 1839, Theodore Weld cited an advertisement
in South Carolina’s Charleston Mercury (12 October 1838) that
states:
To Planters and others.—Wanted fifty negroes. Any person having
sick negroes, considered incurable by their respective physicians, and
wishing to dispose of them, Dr. S. will pay cash for Negroes affected
with scrofula or king’s evil, confirmed hypocondriasm [sic], apoplexy,
diseases of the liver, kidneys spleen, stomach and intestines, bladder
and its appendages, diarrhea, dysentery, &c. The highest cash price
will be paid on application as above (268).
Forced Population Increase: Replenishing the Labor Force at a Lower
Cost to the Planters
One way that the planters found to replace slaves who were unable to
work was to “breed their own.” This inhumane practice was
witnessed by Fanny Kemble, and is recorded in her writings. Kemble,
a renowned European actress, toured the American theater circuit with
her father in 1832. While in the U.S., she met and married Pierce Butler,
a Georgia plantation owner. Kemble’s startling journals, written
between 1832 and 1839 (the first of which were published as American
Journal in 1835, and additional entries as Plantation Journal in 1863),
documents the wretched condition in which Butler’s slaves existed.
It also provides readers with evidence of the consequences of maltreatment
to the life expectancy of the slave, and to the productivity of slave
labor.
Kemble’s astonishment at the tremendous suffering endured, especially
by the female slaves, caused the actress to become an active mediator
between her own husband and his slaves who asked Kemble to plead on
their behalf. In her account of Teresa, a slave flogged for complaining
to Kemble about her “back being broken by hard work and childbearing,”
Kemble details the brutality imposed on slave women who were expected
to bear numerous children and still continue to complete field work
(151). Kemble describes the financial importance of successful reproduction
among the slaves: “This morning I have been to the hospital to
see a poor woman who has just enriched Mr. Butler by borning him another
slave” (158).
In a “day-book,” Kemble recorded a list of slave women who
appealed to her for food or medical assistance because of her willingness
to ease their sufferings. As she records, her list includes in part:
(1) “Fanny who has had six children; all dead but one. She came
to beg to have her work in the field lightened,” (2) “Nanny
who has had three children; two of them are dead. She came to implore
that the rule of sending them into the field three weeks after their
confinement might be altered,” (3) “Leah, Caesar’s
wife, has had six children; three are dead,” (4) “Sophy,
Lewis’s wife, came to beg for some old linen. She is suffering
fearfully; has had ten children; five of them are dead. The principal
favour she asked was a piece of meat, which I gave her,” and (5):
“Sarah, Stephen’s wife—this woman’s case and
history were alike deplorable. She had had four miscarriages, had brought
seven children into the world, five of whom were dead, and was again
with child. She complained of dreadful pains in the back, and an internal
tumour which swells with the exertion of working in the fields; probably,
I think, she is ruptured” (172).
Kemble describes plantation slave “hospitals” that were
no more than bedless, smoke-filled huts filled with hemorrhaging slave
women who bore numerous slave babies while endeavoring to continue difficult
field labors. Kemble’s record of the conditions that “her
own” slave women endured provide confirmation of the counterproductive
practices which planters adopted in order to increase production on
failing plantations. The tremendous infant mortality rate required that
slave women be in a state of almost perpetual pregnancy—all the
while still laboring in the fields.
The forced breeding of male and female slaves took place frequently,
but Kemble notes that this practice was not as horrifying to her as
was another common occurrence: slaveowners and overseers fathering their
own slave children. While visiting Butler’s plantation on the
island of St. Simons’s, Kemble was struck by the abundance of
mulattos and fair-skinned slaves working on the island. Kemble recalls:
A horrid-looking filthy woman met us with a little child in her arms,
a very light mulatto, whose extraordinary resemblance to Driver Bran
(one of the officials who had been duly presented to me on my arrival,
and who was himself a mulatto) struck me directly. I pointed it out
to Mr. Butler, who merely answered, “Very likely his child.”
“And,” said I, “did you never remark that Driver Bran
is the exact image of Mr. King? [another of Butler’s overseers
on the mainland]”
“Very likely his brother,” was the reply: all which rather
unpleasant state of relationships seemed accepted as such a complete
matter of course, that I felt rather uncomfortable, and said no more
about who was like who (163).
Historian Deborah Gray White substantiates Kemble’s eyewitness
accounts and explains in Ar’nt I a Woman? that “In the pre-civil
War period black women were very prolific. According to demographers
the crude birthrate exceeded fifty per one thousand, meaning that each
year more than one fifth of the black women in the 15-to-44 age cohort
bore a child.” White continues:
Female slavery had much to do with work, but much of it was concerned
with bearing, nourishing, and rearing children whom slaveholders needed
for the continual replenishment of their labor force. . . . This does
not mean that work and childbearing were always kept in perfect balance.
The extent to which the slaveowner consciously emphasized one or the
other ultimately depended on his needs . . . slaveowners attended to
the proverbial bottom line by striving to maximize profits (69).
Fogel and Engerman contradict Kemble and White in claiming that: “Slave
health care was at its best for pregnant women. . . . During the last
month of pregnancy work was further reduced, although various planters
felt . . . that ‘pregnant women are always to do some work up
to the time of their confinement, if it is only walking into the field
and staying there’” (122). Fogel and Engerman’s “computations
based on data from the 1850 census” allege that: “the slave
mortality rate in childbearing was not only low on an absolute scale,
it was also lower than the maternal death rate experience by southern
white women” (123). They do not, however, explain the method used
for “computations,” and fail to distinguish between aristocratic
Southern white or poor Southern white women. Furthermore, the basis
of their view on slaves’ pre- and post-natal care derives from
accounts written by white male planters. The two notoriously discount
the frequency of the sexual exploitation of slave women by their masters
and overseers:
The point at issue here is not whether the sexual exploitation of slave
women by masters and overseers existed, but whether it was so frequent
that it undermined or destroyed the black family . . . Even if all these
reports are true, they constituted at most a few hundred cases. By themselves,
such a small number of observations out of a population of millions,
could just as easily be used as proof of the infrequency of the sexual
exploitation of black women as of its frequency (130–31).
They explain the presence of a large proportion of the “tawny,
golden, and white or nearly white” slaves, as evidenced by people
traveling through the South during that time, as “proof beyond
denial of either the ubiquity of the exploitation of black women by
white men, or of the promiscuity of black women, or of both” (131–32).
Abolitionist Literature: A Campaign for Human Rights
The aforementioned treatment of the slaves, male and female, combined
with a natural yearning for their own freedom, prompted many of them
to attempt to flee their condition. A growing sentiment among many Americans
and Europeans concerning the abolition of slavery provided escaping
slaves with a possibility for freedom. Fugitive slave testimonies such
as Frederick Douglass’s narratives and William and Ellen Craft’s
Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, along with the, books, letters,
pamphlets, and speeches delivered by abolitionists such as David Walker,
Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina E. Grimké, Sojourner Truth, William
Lloyd Garrison, and others enlightened many Northerners and Southerners
to the injustices of chattel slavery. Fictional works such as those
written by Stowe, Douglass, and William Wells Brown additionally provided
readers with an antislavery perspective on this incendiary political
issue: the right of one man to enslave another based simply on his race.
David Walker, whose father was a slave, was born free in North Carolina.
Walker traveled the South protesting slavery. In 1827, he moved to Boston
and became instrumental in the publishing of black newspapers and anti-racist
literature. Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles, Together with a
Preamble, to the Colored Citizens of the World, But in Particular, and
Very Expressly to those of the United States of America was published
in 1829. Robert Levine notes that “Though the book became notorious
for its militant assertion that blacks, when faced with the possibility
of enslavement, should ‘kill or be killed,’ . . . the overarching
intention of the volume was not to push blacks toward a race war . .
. but to argue for blacks’ rights to freedom and dignity in the
United States” (Levine 349). In response to Jefferson’s
Notes, Walker describes his dismay at the ignorance of Mr. Jefferson’s
opinion of the propriety of chattel slavery: “It is indeed surprising,
that a man of such great learning, combined with such excellent natural
parts should speak so of a set of men in chains. I do not know what
to compare it to, unless, like putting one wild deer in an iron cage,
where it will be secured, and hold another by the side of the same,
then let it go, and expect the one in the cage to run as fast as the
one at liberty” (351).
Walker’s bold defiance in the face of white leaders prompted questions
concerning the morality of slavery and the equality of men. Walker’s
Appeal “led Southerners to blame Walker for Nat Turner’s
insurrection of 1831” (Levine 349). Literary attacks on the slave
system such as Walker’s Appeal eroded the social foundation on
which the institution was constructed. The common theme of abolitionist
literature published in the mid nineteenth century was the inhumanity
and cruelty of chattel slavery. Many Americans were repulsed by the
stories and accounts written by former slaves, and by witnesses’
reports of the atrocities suffered by some slaves. As the widespread
influence of abolitionist literature grew, Southern planters found it
difficult to garner public support for their unique way of life. John
C. Calhoun warned Congress in 1837:
We have, in fact, but just entered that condition of society where
the strength and durability of our political institutions are to be
tested; and I venture nothing in predicting that the experience of the
next generation will fully test how vastly more favorable our condition
of society is . . . provided we are not disturbed by the interference
of others, or shall have sufficient intelligence and spirit to resist
promptly and successfully such interference (374).
The “interference” of which Calhoun speaks is the overwhelming
pressure that was being applied to the South by abolitionist forces
intent on eradicating the practice of slavery in the United States.
Calhoun’s charge to the Congress was an oratory alert for Southerners
to hold fast to the “existing relation between the two races in
the South, against which these blind fanatics are waging war”
as he predicts that “in the course of a few years they [residents
of non-slaveholding states] will be succeeded by those who will have
been taught to hate the people and institutions of nearly one-half of
this Union” (374).
One of the most vehement of Calhoun’s “fanatics” was
abolitionist lecturer Theodore Dwight Weld. Weld’s American Slavery
As It Is, published in 1839, is considered to be one of the most influential
antislavery books of the time. According to Mason Lowance, Stowe credits
this book and other authentic examples, such as newspaper clippings
and other sources, as the inspiration behind The Key to Uncle Tom’s
Cabin, published in 1853 (53). Weld’s work, a tremendous compilation
of first-hand accounts—subtitled The Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses—brought
the horrors of slavery to the public’s attention in a frank and
direct manner. As a seminary student in the early 1830s, the white Connecticut-born
Weld became a leading activist working for the abolition of slavery.
He married Angelina E. Grimké, another militant abolitionist,
in 1838, and continued his abolitionist work through the 1850s. In this
selection, Weld attests:
We will prove that the slaves in the United States are treated with
barbarous inhumanity; that they are overworked, underfed, wretchedly
clad and lodged, and have insufficient sleep; that they are often made
to wear round their necks iron collars armed with prongs, to drag heavy
chains and weights at their feet while working in the field, and to
wear yokes, and bells, and iron horns; that they are often kept confined
in the stocks day and night for weeks together, made to wear gags in
their mouths for hours or days, have some of their front teeth torn
out or broken off, that they may be easily detected when they run away;
that they are frequently flogged with terrible severity, have red pepper
rubbed into their lacerated flesh, and hot brine, spirits of turpentine,
&c., poured over the gashes to increase the torture; that they are
often stripped naked, their backs and limbs cut with knives, bruised
and mangled by scores and hundreds of blows with the paddle, and terribly
torn by the claws of cats, drawn over them by their tormentors; that
they are often hunted with blood hounds and shot down like beasts, or
torn in pieces by dogs; that they are often suspended by the arms and
whipped and beaten till they faint, and when revived by restoratives,
beaten again till they faint, and sometimes till they die; that their
ears are often cut off, their eyes knocked out, their bones broken,
their flesh branded with red hot irons; that these things, and more,
and worse, we shall prove (266–67).
Weld’s account of slave abuse testifies to the counterproductive
practices adopted by planters. Weld testified that the slaves were “overworked”
and “underfed,” thereby proving that in the quest for higher
production, planters often destroyed the health of their own slaves.
Likewise, the torturous disciplinary methods used by planters, which
were intended to increase work or discourage rebellion, all too often
resulted in the death or maiming of slaves.
As Walker appealed to the “colored citizens of the world,”
Angelina E. Grimké sent out a plea to Christian women everywhere,
but especially to the Christian women of the South. In 1836, Grimké
published Appeal to the Christian Women of the South. Grimké
and her sister Sarah M. Grimké had been born and raised in a
slaveholding family in South Carolina. Growing up, the sisters learned
to hate the institution of slavery; therefore, they moved to New England,
became Quakers and joined William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist
movement (Lowance 197), and became popular antislavery lecturers. According
to Levine, the sisters became “staunch Garrisonian abolitionists
and advocates of women’s rights” (451). In Appeal, Angelina
calls on Southern women to stand up for the rights of slaves and the
rights of women and to oppose the Southern patriarchy in which they
lived. She pleads:
Read on the subject of slavery. Search the Scriptures daily, whether
the things I have told you are true. . . . Pray over this subject .
. . pray to your father, who seeth in secret, that he would open your
eyes to see whether slavery is sinful, and if it is, that he would enable
you to bear a faithful, open and unshrinking testimony against it, and
to do whatsoever your hands find to do, leaving the consequences entirely
to him, who still says to us whenever we try to reason away duty from
the fear of consequences (453).
Grimké’s message was a literary “call to arms”
directing Southern women to rebel against the system that had protected
and sheltered them from the realities of chattel slavery. Shedding light
on the radical nature of Grimké’s petition, Fox-Genovese
explains the social status and responsibilities of the Southern slaveholder’s
wife:
Immersed in the household, they responded to the specifics of everyday
life in patterns of behavior and belief that had negative as well as
positive overtones. . . . For they were generally God-fearing women
who interpreted everyday relations and responsibilities as manifestations
of social and divine order. . . . The white slaveholding women’s
sense of community rested upon a psychological sense of belonging to
a proper order—upon an obliteration or softening of the boundaries
between egos, rather than an accentuation of them (100).
Southern slaveholding women were raised not to question the authority
of their men. In the subjective act of compliance, these women often
turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to the slave’s plight, or they
were intentionally sheltered from the actual goings on of the plantation
by their husbands and fathers. If slaveholding women opposed or questioned
the system under which they lived, they were admonished by their husbands
or male relatives, as in Fanny Kemble’s case. In Incidents in
the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs describes a situation involving
her slave protagonist Linda Brent that supports Fanny Kemble’s
claims of miscegenation and a planter husband’s deception:
“After a while my mistress sent for me to come to her room. Her
first question was, ‘Did you know you were to sleep in the doctor’s
room?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘Who told you?’
‘My master.’
‘Will you answer truly all the questions I ask?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘Tell me, then, as you hope to be forgiven, are you innocent of
what I have accused you?’
‘I am.’
She handed me a Bible, and said, “Lay your hand on your heart,
kiss this holy book, and swear before God that you tell me the truth.”
(36).
Linda’s mistress was saddened by her own husband’s advances
toward the slave girl, but Jacobs describes the mistress’s reaction
to this knowledge: “She felt that her marriage vows were desecrated,
her dignity insulted; but she had no compassion for the poor victim
of her husband’s perfidy. . . . She was not a very refined woman,
and had not much control over her passions. I was an object of her jealousy,
and consequently of her hatred” (37). Examples of reactions such
as this pervade antebellum literature as writers demonstrate the residual
effects of slave abuse to plantation home life. Women, white and black
alike, were subjected to the patriarchal view of Southern men that viewed
and treated women as property. Fox-Genovese quotes George Fitzhugh as
he protests the right of individual freedom as the “solvent of
any society worthy of the name,” as he declares: “be she
white, or be she black, she is treated with kindness and humanity”
(199). Fox-Genovese interprets Fitzhugh’s view of the South’s
patriarchal system: “Women, like children, have only one right—the
right to protection. The right to protection involves the obligation
to obey” (199). Male heads of household conducted all plantation
business dealings. In her description of slavery in the State of Kentucky,
Stowe recounts:
Whoever visits some estates there, and witnesses the good-humored indulgence
of some masters and mistresses, and the affectionate loyalty of some
slaves, might be tempted to dream the oft-fabled poetic legend of a
patriarchal institution, and all that; but over and above the scene
there broods a portentous shadow—the shadow of law. So long as
the law considers all these human beings, with beating hearts and living
affection, only as so many things belonging to a master (50–51).
Some Southern women defended their positions in living a martyr-like
existence that was imposed upon them by unscrupulous men. Mary Chesnut’s
Civil War indicates the turbulent emotions experienced by a Southern-born
slaveholding woman in the face of abolitionist criticism. In a journal
entry marked “18 March 1861, Augusta, GA,” Mary Chesnut
declares her position on slavery and describes the life of a white slaveholding
woman:
I wonder if it be a sin to think slavery a curse to any land. . . .
Men and women are punished when their masters and mistresses are brutes
and not when they do wrong—and then we live surrounded by prostitutes.
An abandoned woman is sent out of any decent house elsewhere. Who thinks
any worse of a Negro or mulatto woman for being a thing we can’t
name? God forgive us, but ours is a monstrous system and wrong and iniquity.
Perhaps the rest of the world is as bad—this only I see. Like
the patriarchs of old our men live all in one house with their wives
and their concubines, and the mulattoes ones sees in every family exactly
resemble the white children . . . Thank God for my countrywomen—alas
for the men? No worse than men everywhere, but the lower their mistresses,
the more degraded they must be (29–30).
Chesnut claims that the blame of the “iniquity” of slavery
lies on the patriarchy that governs the system. In doing so, she admits
the helplessness of the slaveholding woman to alter her situation in
the slavery system. Chesnut detests the abuses occurring within the
institution that supports the lifestyle to which she has become accustomed.
In addition, her diaries are proof of the growing awareness, even among
sheltered Southern women, that the time had come to defend women and
their rights. As Southern women began to question and challenge their
lifestyle and its precepts, the planters’ world came under fire
from two opponents: abolitionists and the supporters of women’s
rights.
Another fiery challenger of slavery and women’s rights was Sojourner
Truth. One of her famous speeches appeared in the Anti-Slavery Bugle
on June 21, 1851. The former slave woman depicted the Southern man’s
imminent position: “Man, where is your part? . . . [M]an is in
a tight place, the poor slave is on him, woman is coming on him, and
he is surely between a hawk and a buzzard” (459). Truth put it
simply; the Southern planter was trapped between two equally dangerous
factions: women and slaves. For hundreds of years, both groups had been
denied rights and equality. And now with the growing popularity and
acceptance of abolitionist and suffragist literature, the lofty position
of the slaveholder was becoming precarious in the views of many Americans.
This social precariousness combined with strained plantation finances
spelled impending disaster for the slavery system.
The movement for women’s rights began to integrate homogeneously
with abolitionist theory and its mission, creating an even stronger
adversary of white male planters. According to Mason Lowance, editor
of Against Slavery: An Abolitionist Reader, “William Lloyd Garrison
(1805–1879) is generally considered to be the dean of the abolitionist
movement in the United States.” Lowance adds, “during the
1820’s and 1830’s American women were beginning to perceive
the association between their own oppressed condition and that of the
African slaves, so that the aggressive abolitionist movement led by
Garrison and his followers gave them an opportunity to develop arguments
for female emancipation that paralleled the argument for the abolition
of slavery” (xvii). What Lowance describes as a “national
movement” was sweeping the United States in the mid nineteenth
century, creating public organizations and societies, such as Garrison’s
American Anti-slavery Society in 1833, that were developed for the sole
purpose of the abolition of slavery. Because of abolitionist literature
and speeches, the public’s knowledge of slavery and its horrors
broadened. True testaments of former slaves combined with the efforts
of reformers such as Garrison, Weld, Walker, Grimké, and Truth
caused abolitionist sympathizers to aid fugitive slaves in their pursuit
of freedom, thus creating greater economic woes for planters who depended
on slave labor.
Slave Flight and Rebellion: Planters Begin to Lose Their Grip on Slavery
Abolitionists and sympathizers provided secret shelter, supplies, and
safe passage to runaway slaves. As a result of the increasing occurrence
of slave flight, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850. This
law was designed to protect the interests of planters by ensuring the
return of their escaped or runaway slaves. It provided a monetary award
to anyone who captured or reported an escaped slave, and it levied fines
and terms of imprisonment for anyone found to be guilty of aiding escaped
slaves. The law also prevented slaves from receiving a jury trial, or
the opportunity to testify on their own behalf. The passage of this
law created a practical means of recovery for planters who had lost
their “property” due to slave flight. It is important to
note that at this time the voting majority of Congress was largely pro-slavery.
The fact that slaves were counted as three-fifths of a citizen for census
purposes gave the South a significant advantage in the House of Representatives;
therefore, the event of escaping slaves became a detriment to the South’s
political, as well as economic, interests.
Historian Steven Mintz claims that:
The number of slaves who escaped from slavery is unknown; it appears
that the number was about a thousand a year. . . . Most runaways fled
only a short distance. Slaves might hide in nearby swamps to escape
punishment or sale. Many slaves ran away to visit spouses or children.
. . . Those fugitives who were trying to escape slavery did not necessarily
flee northward. Many headed toward Florida or to the Great Dismal Swamp
in Virginia and North Carolina, where they established “maroon”
colonies. Others hid in southern states (151).
Slaves who were able to escape to freedom are valorized in antebellum
literature as their stories become testimonies to the unspeakable indignation
and abuse that was suffered by the slaves. Enveloped in the stories
of successful escapes is evidence of the planters’ desperation
and determination to retrieve “their property.” As abolitionist
forces began to coordinate clandestine routes and hiding places for
escaping slaves, the planters’ “losses” became increasingly
difficult to recover. Sometimes, slaveowners resorted to hiring “slave-catchers”
with bloodhounds to “hunt down” their slaves. Kenneth Stampp
claims:
Many Southerners were convinced that the slave states were honeycombed
with northern abolitionist agents seeking to create discontent among
the slaves and to urge them to abscond. While this was an exaggeration,
a few Northerners did undertake this hazardous enterprise. In 1849,
a Missouri newspaper complained that almost every day slaves were induced
“by the persuasions of Abolitionists, to abandon comfortable homes.”
(Peculiar 121).
Stampp also adds, “southern masters were less disturbed about
the ultimate consequences than they were about their immediate losses.
Moreover, every successful runaway was bound to encourage other slaves
to try their luck in the same enterprise” (122).
The desire for freedom burned brightly in the slaves’ souls. If
captured during an escape attempt, some slaves would choose to die rather
than return to their masters. Abolitionists believed that the slaves
who chose death over capture were martyrs and antebellum literature
contains many true and fictional accounts of this type of martyr. Slaveowners
realized that an attempt to capture a runaway could very easily end
in the slave’s death, in the case of a slave who had acquired
a weapon, or in the deaths of members of the slave-hunting party. Therefore,
attempts at slave recovery were always a gamble. The Fugitive Slave
Law insured the retrieval of planters’ “property”
during this last decade of effort to keep the slave system operating.
Resulting from the enactment of the law, several sensational incidents
exposed the desperate actions taken by escaping slaves. These cases
have inspired writers to retell stories such as that of Margaret Garner,
a fugitive slave from Kentucky. One of the most famous of “desperation”
tales, Garner’s story was the basis for Nobel Prize-winning author
Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, published in 1987. Garner was one
of seventeen Kentucky slaves who escaped in January of 1856 when the
Ohio River was frozen over; their story is recounted by Stephen Mintz
who cites Levi Coffin’s 1876 Reminiscences as his source. Mintz
explains:
An old slave named Simon and his wife Mary, together with their son
Robert and his wife Margaret Garner and four children, made their way
to the house of a colored man named Kite, who had formerly lived in
their neighborhood and had been purchased from slavery by his father,
Joe Kite. They had to make several inquiries in order to find Kite’s
house, which was below Mill Creek, in the lower part of the city. This
afterward led to their discovery; they had been seen by a number of
persons on their way to Kite’s, and were easily traced by pursuers.
The other nine fugitives were more fortunate. They made their way up
town and found friends who conducted them to safe hiding-places, where
they remained until night. They were put on the Underground Railroad,
and went safely through to Canada (164).
Mintz continues to explain that as the “masters of the fugitives,
with officers and a posse of men” surrounded Kite’s house,
the fugitives determined that they would fight back. As the pursuers
battered down the door, Margaret Garner grabbed a knife from a nearby
table and “with one stroke cut the throat of her little daughter,
whom she probably loved the best” (165). Garner’s refusal
to allow her little girl to be taken back into slavery is a shocking
testament to a slave mother’s refusal to allow her child to live
a life of slavery. The entire group was put on trial, and the Commissioner
remanded the fugitives back into slavery citing “the law of Kentucky
and the United States made it a question of property” (165).
Increasing abolitionist support along with the expanding distribution
of abolitionist literature turned many escaped slaves to folk heroes.
Stories of courageous escapes and valiant revolts encouraged abolitionists
and alarmed slaveholders. In Clotel, Brown declares the increasing occurrence
of slave flight: “No country has produced so much heroism in so
short a time, connected with escapes from peril and oppression, as has
occurred in the United States among fugitive slaves, many of whom show
great shrewdness in their endeavors to escape from this land of bondage”
(165).
According to Levine, one of the most inspirational figures for
Brown’s novel was the slave preacher, and rebellion leader Nat
Turner. Levine notes that Brown devoted an entire chapter to Turner
in his 1863 The Black Man, His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements
(427). Turner, along with approximately fifty other slaves, led a bloody
revolt against white planters in Southampton County, Virginia in 1831.
Following the apprehension of the rebels, Turner (the last to be captured)
was interviewed by lawyer Thomas Gray, who published his account of
the interview as The Confessions of Nat Turner in 1831, which reportedly
sold fifty thousand copies. Gray begins Confessions with a note “To
the Public”: “The late insurrection in Southampton has greatly
excited the public mind, and led to a thousand idle, exaggerated and
mischievous reports…Public curiosity has been on the stretch to
understand the origin and progress of this dreadful conspiracy, and
the motives which influence its diabolical actors” (427). Nat
Turner’s revolt incited varying reactions. Southern whites naturally
feared that the revolt would inspire other blacks to rebellion. Because
of revolts such as Turner’s, planters became unsure of the stability
of their labor force. In 1835, in the wake of Turner’s revolt,
the American Anti-Slavery Society mailed pamphlets to slaveholders in
hopes of persuading the recipients that slavery was a sin. In response,
a vigilante group stormed the Charleston post office, seized the mailings
and burned them in the street (Stampp, Imperiled 236). With the insurgence
of abolitionist reform, as the decades progressed, the Southern planters’
future was clouded by their trepidation.
In time, public fear of slave revolt and the South’s growing concern
about the abolitionists’ threats prompted the Supreme Court’s
1857 Dred Scott ruling that upheld the constitutionality of slavery
and officially denied blacks the right to citizenship. On October 16,
1859, partially in response to that ruling, white abolitionist John
Brown, with a force of twenty-one men (five of whom were black), led
an attack on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia.
Militant abolitionists were beginning to charge that violence would
be the only way to bring about change. Brown was executed because of
his crimes two months later. Brown’s capture spurred oral and
written sympathy from many abolitionists and Northern intellectuals,
including Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau, who was an “advocate for
non-violent reform,” had met Brown earlier in the decade, and
was “increasingly disturbed by the government’s participation
in the violence of the slave system” (Levine 503). Thoreau delivered
“A Plea for Captain John Brown” on October 30, 1859 in Concord
Town Hall, an ironic event given the violent circumstances that surrounded
the Harper’s Ferry attack and Thoreau’s own non-violent
precepts as stated in his 1847 essay “Resistance to Civil Government.”
Garrison had always been in favor of pacifism and a non-violent, albeit
non-compromising, end to slavery; however, Thoreau’s defense of
Brown’s actions confirmed that a new breed of abolitionist was
appearing—one who was willing to support the use of force and
violence in order to end slavery. Gradually, abolitionist ideals were
adopted by influential political circles in the North. Abolitionist
reformers influenced Northern industrialists to move their trade to
the newly expanding western territories and “southerners became
increasingly alarmed by federal policies which they thought were giving
economic advantage to the North” (Fogel and Engerman 250). The
ramifications of this growing trend became apparent in the Southern
economy. Fogel and Engerman explain:
To generate a sense of urgency southern newspapers, journals, economic
leaders and politicians continuously emphasized every new economic attainment
of the North and every unrealized objective of the South, every northern
advantage and every southern disadvantage. The abolitionist critique
on the issue of development was lifted—lock, stock, and barrel—from
southern editorials, speeches, and commercial proclamations (250).
In The Causes of the Civil War, published in 1965, editor Kenneth Stampp
quotes Algie M. Simmons from Class Struggles in America:
By 1850 a class began to appear, national in scope, compact in organization,
definite in its desires and destined soon to seize the reins of political
power. . . . This class found its political expression in the Republican
party. . . . It exaggerated the importance of the national government,
opposed further extension of slavery and supported all measures for
more rapid settlement and exploitation of the West. . . . Once the capitalist
class [Republicans] had wrested the national government from the chattel
slave holders, there was nothing for them to do but to secede. The margin
of profits in chattel slavery was already too narrow to permit its continuance
in competition with wage slavery unless the chattel slaveowners controlled
the national government (64–65).
Simmon’s portrayal of the condition of the plantation economy
is evidence that by 1850, the only way that planters could thrive was
to control the nation’s politics. It was imperative in the mid
nineteenth century that the South be able to influence the enactment
of laws such as the Dred Scott Decision and the Fugitive Slave Law in
order to protect their interests. Simons continues by comparing the
goals of the opposing governmental bodies: “The northern capitalists
wanted it [government control] to collect tariffs, build railroads,
shoot down workers, protect trusts, and, in short, to further the interests
of plutocracy. The southern chattel slave owner wanted it to secure
free trade, to run down fugitive slaves, to conquer new territory for
cotton fields, and to maintain the supremacy of King Cotton” (65).
Simmons also claims that by the time of this political clash, the Southern
traders had amassed an enormous debt to the North that “amounted
to something between two hundred and four hundred million dollars”
(65).
Education: A Possibility for Freedom
By the middle of the nineteenth century, many planters needed additional
income to support the lofty lifestyle to which they had become accustomed.
Extra money could be earned by slaves who were hired for work outside
their duties on the plantation. The need for literate slaves became
necessary as the hired slaves were expected to conduct dealings with
whites in town. This literacy carried with it an obvious new danger
to the planters, as seen in the following account.
William and Ellen Craft’s Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom,
published in 1860, is the story of a married couple’s flight from
slavery to Europe for freedom. The feelings about slavery and freedom
that the couple shared in their book document the growing success of
abolitionist sentimentality. William Craft writes:
Having heard while in Slavery that “God made of one blood all
nations of men,” and also that the American Declaration of Independence
says, that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all
men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
inalienable right; that among these, are life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness;” we could not understand by what right we were held
as “chattels.” Therefore, we felt perfectly justified in
undertaking the dangerous and exciting task of “running a thousand
miles” in order to obtain those rights which are so vividly set
forth in the Declaration (1).
As the abolitionist movement grew in force and strength, slaves began
to gain information in the form of gossip, pamphlets, letters, and notices.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, slaves were also beginning
to gain some freedom to move about because of their masters’ financial
woes. One example of this situation is contained in the story of the
Crafts, who made their escape to freedom because of William’s
status as a slave. Barbara McCaskill explains that William became “bank
property after his master lost badly in cotton speculations” (ix–x).
McCaskill adds that “like many slave artisans—blacksmiths,
cobblers, bricklayers, wheelwrights—William’s skills were
in wide demand by less-prosperous farmers and townspeople who lacked
capable labor in these areas; so he was very probably ‘hired out,’
and moved rather unmolested in the region” (x).
The practice of hiring or renting out slaves became common in the mid
nineteenth century due to the increased need of planters to raise additional
income. Because of this fact, some masters realized that it was to their
benefit to have one or two literate slaves on their plantation—literate,
“favored” slaves who could conduct business dealings for
their masters. These slaves were often skilled craftsmen and artisans,
and the money that they earned was the property of their masters, although
some slaves were allowed to keep portions of their earnings. It was
important for slaves such as these to be able to read work orders, as
well as bills of sale, so that they would not be swindled in their dealings.
When plantation owners were forced to liquidate assets, it was also
known that literate slaves would bring higher prices on the auction
block. W.E.B. Du Bois estimates that “despite prohibitions and
negative public opinion, about 5 percent of the slaves had learned to
read by 1860.” However, he adds that the numbers might have even
been higher than that (qtd. in Genovese, Roll 563).
According to laws that varied in severity from state to state, slaves
were forbidden to pursue an education in order that they remain ignorant.
Nevertheless, some slaves managed to learn to read and write on their
own, or with the help of their masters’ families. Stampp declares:
Through laws enacted, reenacted and fortified, they provided for strict
patrol and general police, forbade the teaching of Negroes to read,
forbade masters to hire to slaves their time, forbade Negroes to assemble
without white persons being present, and restricted private emancipation.
These laws were more or less observed or more or less disregarded according
to the course of events and the play of public sentiment between the
social and economic points of view (Peculiar 213).
Some masters believed that slaves should be taught to read the Bible
so that they could be converted to Christianity. Slaveowners who took
this position chose to educate their slaves at home. According to Genovese,
in the years directly preceding the Civil War, literate slaves brought
a higher price on the auction block because they could be trained for
more highly skilled trades: “The laws against teaching slaves
to read and write grew out of a variety of fears, the simplest of which
concerned the forging of passes by potential runaways” (Roll 561).
Southern politicians who opposed the education of slaves defended their
positions with Scriptural references. Where slaves were concerned, Protestants
sometimes took the position of the Catholic Church in denying the Scriptures
to “the ignorant and impressionable” (Roll 562). Those Protestants
believed that slaves would convert to Christianity by hearing “white”
interpretations of the Bible; therefore, it was not necessary for the
slaves to learn to read.
Not all slaveowners heeded the laws against education for slaves. Some
believed that the slaves should indeed have the ability to read the
Bible, and even allowed their own children to educate the slaves. In
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, the former slave recalls
that he succeeded to learn to read and write on his own. He claims,
“My mistress, who kindly commenced to instruct me, had, in compliance
with the advice and direction of her husband, not only ceased to instruct,
but had set her face against my being instructed by any one else”
(Douglass Narrative 31). Douglass finally succeeded by bribing poor
young white boys in his neighborhood to teach him the alphabet in return
for pieces of bread. As young girls, Sarah and Angelina E. Grimké
(daughters of the Honorable John Fouchereau Grimké, judge of
the Supreme Court of South Carolina) taught slave children to read at
night, “fully aware that what they were doing was officially against
the law” (Urban 138). In American Education: A History, authors
Urban and Wagoner report: “Sarah described their secretive activity:
‘The light was put out, the keyhole secured, and flat on our stomachs
before the fire, with spelling books in our hands, we defied the laws
of South Carolina’” (138). In educating the slaves, the
planters risked providing their slaves with a means to escape and rebellion.
Insurrections by slaves such as Nat Turner caused fears to run rampant
among whites who believed that the slaves’ ability to communicate
in the print media would hasten attempts to plot such rebellions. Because
of these fears, slaves risked brutal beatings if they were caught reading
(Genovese Roll 565).
The Southern plantation economy relied completely on the slave labor
force; therefore, educational opportunities were denied to slaves in
order to keep them in their enslaved and destitute condition. Literacy
frightened the aristocratic slaveholders because it allowed the slaves
to become intellectually independent, and slaveholders had good reason
to fear the independence of their slaves. It was imperative for the
white Southern aristocracy to hold to their policy of social and educational
inequality, so that they could maintain their way of life; however,
the growing need for additional income induced the need for some slaves
to become literate. Ironically, the planters’ own financial straits
initiated a countermeasure to their interests as they taught their slaves
to read.
The clandestine education of slaves, like the severe punishment and
murder of slaves, was indeed a counterproductive practice employed by
Southern planters in their frantic bid to maintain the plantation system.
As the abolitionist movement grew in strength and numbers in the U.S
and abroad, fugitive slaves found sympathy and assistance in their plight.
Approaching the mid nineteenth century, planters found that the economic
system on which they had built their livelihoods was in a state of decline.
The rising costs of food, clothing, and medical care caused some planters
to deny the necessities of life to the slaves. This situation, combined
with the mismanagement of the plantation itself (in the form of poor
agricultural practices and slave abuse) created a plethora of problems
that further hindered the planters’ attempts for higher production
in a failing market.
Fogel and Engerman vehemently deny that the slave system was unprofitable,
and their entire purpose in Time on the Cross is to prove that hundreds
of historians and scholars are wrong—that the traditional interpretation
of antebellum economics as a flawed and doomed system is accepted only
because it has been repeated over and over. Stampp, who counters: “Fogel
and Engerman appeared to have been so preoccupied with the efficiency
of slave agriculture that they disregarded irrationality, friction,
and conflict. As a result, two cliometricians who wanted to restore
to blacks their true history in slavery have written a book which deprives
blacks of their voices, their initiative, and their humanity”
(Imperiled 102). Stampp thus appears to value and trust black voices.
He further declares of the explosion of slave testimonies and narratives
that appeared during the 1860’s: “Here, surely is some of
the best evidence historians can hope to find to answer the questions
they have been asking about the culture, personalities, and minds of
black people in bondage. These, then, are the black sources for nearly
all that we are able to learn directly about the slave” (43).
Stampp, however, is quick to discount slave narratives, testimonies
and interviews from later years (1930s): “the best evidence is
not only first-hand but recorded soon after an event has occurred”
(41).
The literature of the antebellum period, especially that which was written
in the mid nineteenth century, attests to the seriousness of the planters’
economic straits. Slave narratives, speeches, novels, and personal writings
such as journals, letters, and interviews all shed light on the failing
economy of the plantation system. In this body of literature, readers
can sense the urgency, fear, and horror that permeated antebellum Southern
society in the face of abolitionist and economic attacks on the Southern
way of life. Many examples within this literature corroborate that the
political, commercial, and social systems that supported the institution
of slavery were deteriorating—and these literary works present
evidence that is completely validated by early and contemporary historians.
Antebellum literature appalls readers with its startling accounts of
slavery, even as it provides insight into the splintering ideologies
and fractured economic systems that guided the South’s stratified
caste system. Through the heartrending, but carefully described stories
of Stowe’s Simon Legree and Uncle Tom, Harriet Jacobs’ Linda
Brent and Dr. Flint, Frederick Douglass and Mr. Covey, Fanny Kemble,
Nat Turner, and many others, we gain appreciation for the tumultuous
human struggle that accompanied the economic demise of the antebellum
plantation system.
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