Chapter 3: The Rationale of Fear
3: The Rationale of Fear
Slaveholders had reason for packing pistols to bed, as any trader might have told them. Alexander Falconbridge, the surgeon on a slaver, could have pointed out that few of the Negroes brooked "the loss of their liberty" and that they were "ever on the watch to take advantage of the least negligence in their oppressors." Insurrections were "frequently the consequences," and they were seldom put down without much bloodshed.

Almost from the beginning there was bloodshed. In Gloucester County, Virginia, in 1663, Negro slaves joined with white indentured servants in a conspiracy to rebel, but the plot was discovered. The alleged ringleaders were drawn and quartered and their bloody heads were impaled on posts in a public place. A slave plot to wipe out the whites galvanized three Virginia counties into panic in 1687, although the ambitious scale of the conspiracy had betrayed it. Again the leaders were caught and horribly done to death; but again the examples made of them did not deter other slaves from desperate bids for freedom. By 1710 there had been a dozen revolts attempted or accomplished in Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey and Massachusetts.

Arson was the facile tool of rebels and avengers. Many a planter leapt to wakefulness in the dead of night to find the sky lurid with flames from his grain pile, his stable, or even his dwelling. In New York, in 1712, a rabble of slaves set fire to some buildings late one night. When the whites rushed forth to put out the flames, the slaves, armed with guns and knives, fell upon them, killing nine. Still unsatisfied, the rebels prowled the fear-shocked streets for several hours threatening death to the whites and putting buildings
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to the torch. Nor did they all give up when soldiers converged upon them. "One shot first his wife and then himself and some who had hid themselves in town when they went to apprehend them cut their own throats." But more than twenty were caught and sentenced to die, one by "slow fire," that he might "continue in torment for eight or ten hours."

Ships on the brutal Middle Passage from the West Indies to the mainland were sometimes the rolling stages of rebellion. The American slaver Kentucky was one such -- but she put it down and fortyseven slaves, among them a woman, were killed for daring to revolt. "They were ironed or chained, two together, and when they were hung, a rope was put around their necks and they were drawn up to the yardarm clear of the sail. This did not kill them, but only choked or strangled them. They were then shot in the breast and the bodies thrown overboard. If only one of two that were ironed together was to be hung, the rope was put around his neck and he was drawn up clear of the deck and his leg laid across the rail and chopped off to save the irons."

How the concept of the patient, docile Negro ever came into being is a minor marvel of historical delusion. It was created against tremendous odds of fact and circumstance. Perhaps it was a psychological necessity of the sort that sometimes prompts people to blind themselves to wish-destroying fact, and little boys, frightened of the dark, to whistle gay, pretentious tunes. Whatever the cause of it, there the delusion was, bigger than life, and, it might be said, as real -- a sort of sublimation of guilt, or fear, or both. It was there when all actuality denied it. It was there in complete contradiction to the law, to the Black Codes which said in effect that the Negro was restive, dangerous, murderous under slavery; that the Negro loved freedom enough to hazard his life for it on only the dimmest chance of winning; and that in order to quench the leaping fires of his rebellious nature, the flood of despotism must mount unchecked.

The concept of the Negro as knee-bending, head-bowing slave was there, but the law courts did not act as if they credited it. The policy of the law was to avoid the prosecution of masters whose punishment of slaves was "malicious, cruel, and excessive" even to the point of murder. "The power of the master must be absolute to render the submission of the slave perfect," declared a justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court. And the courts of law went ruthlessly
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about the business of developing juridical and social means of carrying out an involved but consummate system of controls.

It took a little time, for the frontiersman was highly volatile, highly individual. Personal precedent and privilege yielded only haltingly to communal law. But eventually a creed emerged, for it was a transfer-in-trust from Caribbean new world history, a necessitous condition of modern slavery, and a resource of sanguine expectation in the heart of new American man. And what a man he was! How clear-mettled and how ambiguous, how irresolute and how obstinate, how self-righteous and how self-condemning, how kind and how callous, how simple, complex and altogether contradictory. And these opposing attributes are shown nowhere better than in the way he handled slavery.

Devices for controlling slaves developed with the slave system or sprang man-size from the womb of expediency. An early device was the simple but effective one of separating slaves of the same family or tribe. Often the inhabitants of entire African villages, closely knit by ties of memory and blood, were captured and sold individually into slavery. Thus a mother might be traded off into the West Indies, a father in Virginia, and the children scattered among owners in New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts. Later, cries of indignation arose over this dispersion when it affected families that had known nothing but bondage. Indeed, it was called the "darkest crime" of slavery. Curiously enough, while at the same time men argued that slaves had no family-feeling and no finer instincts, those who wished to earn or keep reputations as good masters counted it a mortal sin to drag mother from child, wife from husband, sister from brother. Much of the opprobrium that was heaped upon slave dealers stemmed from a general feeling of revulsion over this practice. Private owners seldom followed it except to save themselves from great financial embarrassment, or except as punishment for the most unruly slaves. From the beginning however, no horror attached to disrupting the family ties of slaves just brought from Africa, and yet it must have been most cruel for these bewildered strangers in a strange land. All they had -- if not family love -- was tribal memory and the sense of community they shared with each other. Sundering these bonds of consanguinity, of group experience and identity, was the ultimate ravishment.

Nor did it always produce the desired end. Some slaves of course,
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cut off from all the things and people they had known, committed suicide. But such cases were exceptional, for even under slavery and given to spells of deep melancholy, the Africans had a robust love of life. Forced because of the separation from their own kind, to learn a strange language, take on an alien mode of life, acquire a foreign culture-pattern, the early slaves knit up ties with white indentured servants. The mixing of these two elements in the population compounded discontent. Indentured servants had grievances too. The legal and customary distinctions between them and slaves were so slight as hardly to be observed. They were, most of these servants, "unruly" and "spirited," and the Oliverians among them had a green knowledge of what group rebellion meant. They made common cause with the slaves.

Indeed, as already mentioned, the first serious servile conspiracy to rebel found servants and slaves allied in 1663. Nine years later the colonial Assembly of Virginia deemed it wise to point up an enactment permitting runaway slaves to be killed with impunity with the following words:

Forasmuch as it hath beene manifested to this grand assembly that many negroes have lately beene, and are now out in rebellion in sundry parts of this country, and that noe means have yet beene found for the apprehension and suppression of them from whom many mischiefes of very dangerous consequences may arise to the country if either other negroes, Indians or servants should happen to fly forth and joyne with them.

The threat to slave control that these alliances held was very real in some of the other colonies too. New Jersey was aware of it and took steps to put it down. New York was startled in 1741 by the sworn testimony of Mary Barton and Peggy Kerry, white indentured servants and the confessed love-partners of slaves, who revealed a servile plot in which at least twenty-five white redemptioners were allied with four times that number of Negro slaves. The testimony of these two women brought to punishment more than a hundred persons -- among them Peggy Kerry's lover and the father of her child -- some of whom were burned at the stake, some hanged, and some banished.

All during the late years of the seventeenth and the early years of the eighteenth centuries servant-slave rebellion flared with frightening
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persistence. A rumor was enough to throw whole countries into panic and to pull the colonial legislative trigger in alarm. Laws for the control of slaves grew steadily more rigorous, until, in general, the master's right of property in his slave involved absolute control over the slave's person and conduct. Thus a master could whip his slaves at will, cut their rations, crop their ears, brand them, pillory them, or inflict upon them any other punishment that seemed, in his judgment, "right." Slaves could not leave their masters' premises without a pass. They had no right of assembly. They could not own property and therefore could not buy or sell or trade. Arms were forbidden them. Dogs were taboo. Slaves could not sue or be sued, prosecute for a battery, nor enter a civil suit. They could not give evidence against a white person. Not even in self-defense could they lift their hands against a "Christian" white, and in Virginia until 1788 it was legally impossible for a white man to murder a slave. The death of a slave under punishment was either accidental homicide or manslaughter, neither of which made white men liable to prosecution.

For the execution of the distinctive body of "Negro laws" most colonies, and later the states, had distinctive courts and procedures. Virginia early instituted a special court for the "speedy prosecution" of slaves. In most states slaves had no right to trial by jury and got none. They could be, and most often were, tried, usually on the warrant of a commission of oyer and terminer, in "Negro courts." The justices might, and frequently did have only the most casual acquaintance with the technicalities of the law. The slave himself, of course, had no acquaintance whatever. He did not really need any; nor, had he had, would it have done him any good. Putting into words the original and long-prevailing fact, the Constitutional Court of South Carolina ruled:

A slave can invoke neither Magna Charta not common law.... In the very nature of things he is subject to despotism. Law to him is only a compact between his rulers, and the questions which concern him are matters agitated between them. The various acts concerning slaves contemplate throughout the subordination of the servile class to every free white person and enforce the stern policy which the relation of master and slave necessarily requires. Any conduct of a slave inconsistent with due subordination contravenes the purpose of these acts.
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This was in 1847, when by some accounts the ironhanded repressiveness of customary attitudes and of law had somewhat relaxed and, by these same accounts, slavery in the South was a benevolent paternalism.

But when the Black Codes started generating their blacker progeny, the middle of the nineteenth century was a long way off. Meantime the spirit of their increasing purpose seeped into factors of psychological conditioning so various, so subtle and pervasive as to defy complete analysis. There was propaganda; and yet it was not wholly this, for these prolocutors -- politicians, preachers, and professors -- believed it. Doctrine and the sincerity with which it was uttered were a hard combination to withstand. That belief came after the substance of the law only proves the influence of matter over mind. The law had said that the Negro was inferior; now pointing to the slave's mudsill status as empirical proof, anthropologists and sociologists declared so too. "The political responsibility for bringing slavery to this continent," said the politicians, "can be wiped from our escutcheon." The professors at first were more restrained and cautious. "We think we are prepared to say that when all the evils of slavery [in the South] are put together... the fair conclusion will be that the whole sum is but a small fraction of the same classes of evils that from time immermorial have belonged and still belong to the barbarism of the fatherland of this race.... We see, then, that the evils of American slavery are blessings as compared with the general fate of the African race in their native continent." But professorial restraint went by the board in the 1830's, when Professor Thomas R. Dew, of the College of William and Mary, advanced a philosophical defense of slavery. It was a defense fashioned after the Positivist social order of Auguste Comte, and it boldly cast aside the principles of brotherhood and equality. Liberty and equality? Mere romantic nonsense. Brotherhood? A snare and a delusion. "And what is the meaning [of equality] in the Charter of our rights? Simply, that royal blood, and noble blood, is no better than any other blood; and therefore, that we will have no king, and no aristocracy. ... It goes no further than to cut off the hereditary claims of kings and nobles."

Nor was this all by any means.

In the beginning slaveholders generally opposed religious instruction
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and baptism for slaves. They believed that an understanding of Christianity would create grave disturbances among the black people. It was better that the African priests continue to practice the heathen rights of Obi and perpetuate their outlandish gods of sticks and straw among the slaves. The law of 1667, which declared that baptism did not alter "the condition of a person as to his bondage or his freedom," aroused no proselyting zeal among the master class. "Talk to a planter of the soul of a negro," an English observer said in 1705, "and he'll be apt to tell you (or at least his actions speak loudly) that the body of one of them may be worth twenty Pounds; but the souls of an hundred of them would not yield him one Farthing." An English lady of the West Indies wrote the Reverend Morgan Godwyn, a rector in Virginia, that one "might as well baptize puppies as Negroes." Still later, in 1765, a Quaker missionary was moved to complain that "it is too manifest to be denied, that the life of religion is almost lost where slaves are very numerous."

But the English Society for the Propagation of the Bible in Foreign Parts did not campaign for the religious instruction of slaves entirely to no avail. Before the close of the eighteenth century, many churches had slave galleries and many masters hired carefully chosen ministers to preach to their congregated blacks. There were even some Negro preachers, but they were harried bootleggers of the Gospel, like the Reverend William Moses, of Williamsburg, Virginia. Frequently arrested and whipped for holding meetings, Preacher Moses nevertheless carried on between 1770 and 1790, secretly preparing other Negroes for his high calling. Black congregations presided over by black ministers aroused the quick fear and suspicion of the slaveholders, and for a time after 1800, the year of the slave revolt led by Gabriel Prosser, Negro preachers were rated dangerous criminals, for some of them were suspected of being involved with Gabriel.

Still, in spite of the hindrances to participation in the religious life, about one in twenty-five slaves was a member of a church in 1800. To preach to these, ministers were chosen for their skill at squaring the fact of slavery with the word of God. Apparently it was not a hard skill to acquire, and though the established churches -- Episcopal and Catholic -- did not actually require it, their bishops and archbishops, some of whom owned slaves themselves, looked upon it with smug approval. The right kind of preaching was a method of
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slave-control. And, indeed, compelling slaves to go to church, as masters did increasingly, might help save both souls and slavery.

"Cursed be Canaan, a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren!" The eternal righteousness of God had reduced the blacks to their low estate. That was Gospel. It was expounded nicely, emphasized persistently, promoted fervently. "Masters are taught in the Bible, how they must rule their servants, and servants how they must obey their masters," preached the Reverend Alexander Glennie to the slaves in his South Carolina parish. To make sure of its being heard, he read the biblical passage twice over, and continued with kindly persuasiveness, with gentle exhortation: "Our Heavenly Father commands that you, who are servants, should `be obedient to your masters according to the flesh'; that is, to your earthly master, the master that you serve here while in the body. Here is a very plain command: `servants be obedient': be obedient to your masters. ... As you ought to understand well what is the will of God respecting you, I will read to you again this part of the Bible. `Servants, be obedient....'"

It is no wonder that Frederick Douglass was to say later that he "learned that `God, up in the sky,' made everybody: and that he made white people to be masters and mistresses, and black people to be slaves. This did not satisfy me...."

Nor did it satisfy thousands of others before him and after, for slaves were not always fooled by casuistry and sophistry. Their starved emotions did not leap to the lure. They needed a stronger stimulus, and many of them were regular attendants at secret "brush-arbor" meetings and at clandestine gatherings in some slaves' quarters where in the pitch-black of freighted midnight they could evoke some red-eyed god out of the time of their beginnings. They practiced strange medicine then, brought out perhaps the fetishistic survivals of Obi or of Oxala, and chanted in low voices what they could remember of the white folks' hymns set to the pulsing, melancholy minors of African rhythm.

Yet, somehow they evolved a notion of the Christian God. He was a less temperate, but a kinder, more loving God than their masters'. He understood their troubles and would make things right in the sweet by'n by. Sometimes they grew impatient with the white preachers' notions about God. Sometimes they asked questions. Old Uncle Silas who rose in the middle of a sermon to ask whether "us
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slaves gonna be free in Heaven" got a sophistic brush-off, but the question was the measure of his misery in bondage on earth.

More immediately effective than propaganda in controlling slaves were the personal punishments and rewards that were practically standard on every large slaveholding plantation. For an offense that violated the rules of propriety, a slave might be severely flogged or branded on one or both cheeks. Acts of impropriety ranged from a certain look in the eye of a slave to open impudence; and impudence itself might mean anything, or, as Frederick Douglass put it, "nothing at all, just according to the caprice of the master overseer, at the moment." It was an offense that could be committed in various ways, "in the tone of an answer; in answering at all; in not answering; in the expression of the countenance; in the motion of the head; in the gait, manner and bearing of the slave." No doubt many a slave was marked for life because of a gesture made in a moment when his customary vigilance was relaxed. No doubt, also, many a master had practical cause to regret his ready recourse to brand and whip. Micajah Ricks, a slaveholder of North Carolina, advertised for a runaway: "A few days ago before she went off, I burnt her with a hot iron on the left side of her face; I tried to make the letter M, and she kept a cloth over her head and face, and a fly bonnet on her head so as to cover the burn."

In the final analysis, though few masters seemed to realize it, rewards paid larger and more certain dividends. The loyalty of the body servant and house slave, of old Black Mammy and Uncle Tom and Zeke, over which the Southern romanticists go into their purplest paeans, would have been much less but for the remainders from festive boards, the cast-off clothes, and the occasional coins that were thrown their way. As for the field hands, gay headcloths and chewing tobacco accomplished what lashing could not. Thomas Ruffin, a chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, said that "trivial matters have exceedingly great effect in improving the slave and uniting him to his owner." He knew one successful planter who had produced this effect simply by putting a cheap looking-glass in his slaves' quarters, and another who had done it by having a fence built around the slaves' burial plot.

For good work and for being tractable, slaves were occasionally rewarded with small amounts of cash. Christmas, a holiday that
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lasted a week on liberal plantations, was usually the time of this happy dispensation. A woman might get as much as a dollar; a man twice as much. This was great plenty for those who had so little. The slaves could do what they wished with their money. Some got drunk. Indeed, for a slave "not to be drunk during the holidays was disgraceful" and aroused masters' suspicions. But to be drunk at any other time also aroused suspicions. An inebriated and foot-loose Negro was a dangerous thing.

But some slaves had other uses for their money. The North Carolina Standard, a paper published at Raleigh, lamented satirically that Negroes too often spent money for "expensive costume, whereby very respectable white dandies are scandalized, being insulted by the successful imitation of the style and manner of exquisite and exclusive gentility." Some of those who were vain and improvident enough to buy expensive clothes were also ungrateful enough to run away in them. A Pennsylvania slave master, for instance, advertised a runaway slave as having "a beaver hat, a green worsted coat, a closebodied coat with a green narrow frieze cape," other clothes and a violin. In 1793, one John Dulin, of Maryland, after describing the absconder's rich haberdashery, declared that his runaway slave also had an ample supply of funds.

From giving slaves Christmas money to do with as they wished, to giving them time which they could hire out was a hesitant step in an uncertain direction. Some masters, liberal beyond common and uncommonly affected by pangs of conscience, took it as a means of lightening the slaves' bondage and went on from there to give slaves their freedom or to allow them a share of the earnings, and trusted slaves who had wangled liberal terms could lay by considerable sums. One Milly Lea, of North Carolina, an expert seamstress, saved more than a thousand dollars in a dozen years. Her case was unusual, not because of the comforting size of the sum but because the court gave her a legal right to it. Generally the courts frowned upon slaves having more than enough coin to jingle in their pockets.

Slaves were hired out to industry. Hezekiah Coffin, a manufacturer of Rhode Island, wrote to Moses Brown in 1763 wishing to know "by the first opportunity what the negroes wages was" that he might settle with the masters. The tobacco factories of Richmond, the warehouses and bustling waterfronts of Norfolk, Charleston and New Orleans, and the labor-hungry lumber plants of the mid-South hired
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the time of slaves. Slaves were used in foundries as forgemen and blacksmiths. In the process of building America and making it go, these slaves learned many skills. They mined coal and tended the engines that burned it; they felled timber and planed the boards for building; they quarried stone, and wrought iron, and tempered steel, and created tools. They were more free than the "free" Negroes and more secure than the free poor whites.

But the unequal competition between bond labor and free was one of the grosser evils of slavery. Interclass and intra-sectional at first, it came to have an impact on the economic competition between North and South in direct proportion to the dependence of one section upon the other. But this was somewhat later. The interclass impact aroused resentment against the hired-out slave and led to demands for his restraint.

Advertisements such as the following appeared frequently in the latter half of the eighteenth century:

Five hundred laborers wanted. We will employ the above number of laborers to work on the Muscle Shoals Canal, etc., at the rate of fifteen dollars per month, for twenty-six working days, or we will employ negroes by the year, or for a less time, as may suit the convenience of the planters. We will also be responsible to slave holders who hire their negroes to us, for any injury or damage that may hereafter happen in progress of blasting rock or of caving in of banks.

Wanted to hire, a negro wheelwright. Master's interest protected.

The free white mechanics and laborers realized their disadvantage, but there was not much they could do about it. Politics was one weapon, and violence was another, but the first was ineffective, as the second was dangerous. Slaveholders were not going to stand for trifling with the incomes which their hired-out hands brought them; they were not going to have valuable slave artisans and craftsmen molested. Men of the master class had most of the power in the South. The great tobacco plantations and the tobacco factories belonged to them. Later, the land on which the cotton grew, the gins that cleaned it, and the mills that spun it into cloth were theirs. The political interests were nearly all gathered in their hands, and in South Carolina at least they manipulated them to their exclusive advantage by setting up qualifications for office that slammed the door on all but members of their own class. On the expanding
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Southern frontier, the planters exercised the raw frontier right of the strong to dominate and even utterly destroy the weak. By their connivance and their naked contempt for the poorer whites, they built solid the tradition of class enmity and they cultivated the resultant hatred between laboring white and laboring black, slave and free.

The residue of power reposed in a sturdy, middle class of whites -- Scotch Presbyterians, German Lutherans, and Irish Protestants -- who were non-slaveholding, independent farmers, business men and professionals. White labor made its appeal to these and gained some indefatigable friends who abhorred slavery and all its works. These were the men who wrote letters and signed petitions. In Athens, Georgia, they complained that hired-out slaves had so much cheapened white labor that all but a few white masons and carpenters were forced to leave the city. In other places in Georgia they protested against "negro mechanics whose masters reside in other places, and who pay nothing toward the support of the government." Registering their own dissatisfaction, white craftsmen in South Carolina, North Carolina and Tennessee inveighed against the training of slaves in skilled trades and against masters who used their slave mechanics to underbid free workers in contracts, to the great injury of said free workers. Middle class Virginians considered it a "public evil" that the increase of white seamen was discouraged by the use of slaves as pilots, navigators, and sailors, and they did something about it. In 1784 a law was passed which limited the number of Negroes used in river and bay navigation to one third the total of persons so employed. Within ten years restrictive legislation on hiring out slaves was pretty general, and North Carolina had made it a serious offense for a master to allow a slave to hire his time "under any pretense whatever."

2

By the middle of the eighteenth century strange ideas called "humanitarian" were being bruited about. They dealt with such concepts as the dignity of the human personality, the inalienable rights of man, the responsibility of government, and the place of man in a world from which magic and witchcraft and mystical metaphysics had been forever banished by the bright-eyed philosophers who followed after Descartes. Humanitarianism, which was eventually
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to abolish slavery, bring new spirit to penal codes and institutions, and build refuges for the weak and unfortunate, was disturbing. The notions to which it gave rise had an unsettling effect upon slavery, an institution which, anyway, was not calculated to ease the conscience.

Indeed, the psychology of the average slaveholder was already warped and intorted; his acts were often contrary to his beliefs, his head often in mortal conflict with his heart. His was a split personality, baffled and hypersensitized and infected with an insidious illness. Humanitarianism feezed him. The rationale of slavery was in direct contradiction to the doctrines which, after the 1740's, were getting clearer and clearer statement. It was contrary to the flux of the romantic tide that was beginning to swell and beat against the shores of the western world. The effort to engraft slavery on the whole way of American life and to have its acceptance unquestioned lacked moral conviction. The best minds and the leading minds commenced to probe for more tenable positions, less shaky ground. Thomas Jefferson made known his opposition to slavery. Later his first draft of the Declaration of Independence indicted the King of England for violating the "most sacred rights of life and liberty of a distant people, who never offended him, captivating them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither." Less vocal, Henry Laurens, George Mason and St. George Tucker stood at Jefferson's shoulder.

It is a curious fact that the stirring slogans of the western worldwide revolution, which trumpeted the principles of philanthropy -- "Liberty or death!" "Liberty, fraternity, equality!" -- seemed to abate the tensions of American slavery. Men took the word for the purging deeds and welcomed it with fervor. But riding furiously on the winds of these slogans came the early abolitionists. They, too, were welcomed -- but dubiously and with reservations. They pleaded, coaxed -- especially the Quakers, Baptists and Methodists -- formed societies, and set examples. Their earnest preachments converted some who, already half convinced of human brotherhood, freed their slaves.

When the war itself came, Negroes fought. Some in New England were freed to fight. Some fought as substitutes for their masters. The first man to die under the guns of the Redcoats was Crispus Attucks, an escaped slave. Peter Salem distinguished himself at Bunker Hill
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by killing the British Major Pitcairn, and Salem Poor was cited for heroic action in the Battle of Charleston. In that first year of war, there was scarcely a skirmish or a battle that black men did not fight in. But it did not make sense that slaves should fight to win for others a freedom they could not enjoy. It travestied the principles of the Revolution, as James Otis was quick to declare.

If Otis thought that something was wrong in abstract principle only, he was soon disillusioned. Negroes were going over to the British, who promised them freedom. Lord Dunmore, the Royal Governor of Virginia, had issued a proclamation to that effect. He armed slaves to fight against their masters. This disaffection of the Negroes made a bad situation worse. At first opposed to the enlistment of Negroes in the Continental Army, General George Washington was forced to relent enough to admit free Negroes. But escaping from slavery to go over to the British -- or just escaping -- continued to cause grave concern. If Thomas Jefferson was right, thirty thousand slaves escaped from Virginia masters in one revolutionary year alone. As the situation grew more desperate, following the gloomy winter of 'Seventy-eight, the colonies themselves relaxed General Washington's policy still further. New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Rhode Island enlisted battalions of blacks. Maryland mustered a troop of seven hundred and fifty, promising them freedom and paying bounty to their masters. New York did the same; Virginia and North Carolina took similar steps. By the Constitution of 1780, Massachusetts practically abolished slavery. Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut and New Jersey passed acts for gradual emancipation. Maryland prohibited the importation of slaves and made manumission easier.

So Negroes fought all through the war. They were at Ticonderoga, Bemis Heights and Stony Point. With Lafayette was one James Armistead, so astute a spy that he completely fooled the British Lord Cornwallis and saved Lafayette's army from defeat. In desperate battle against Hessian mercenaries at Point Bridge, New York, Rhode Island blacks "sacrificed themselves to the last man" in defense of an important position. The only woman to bear arms in the Continental Army was a Negro, Deborah Gannett, who enlisted as Robert Shurtliff and discharged "the duties of a faithful, gallant soldier, and at the same time," read the citation of the state of Massachusetts, "preserved the virtue and chastity of her sex...." A Negro, Captain
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Mark Starlin, commanded the Virginia naval vessel Patriot, and Negroes served on the Royal Louis, the Tempest and the Diligence. They were at Red Bank, Princeton and Eutaw Springs. Black Samson of Brandywine, whom the Negro poet Dunbar eulogizes, was not a myth: he did "do great deeds of valor." Negroes crossed the Delaware with Washington, died at Valley Forge, and quartered arms with their white comrades at Yorktown, where, legend has it, one black fellow, forgetting military protocol, yelled out, "Mr. British General, you am Cornwallis, but I'se going now to change your name to Cobwallis, for General Washington, with us colored pussons, has shelled all the corn offen you!" When the war was done at last, many Negro soldiers were reenslaved, but by 1790 there were fifty-nine thousand free blacks, forming, as many came to feel, an ominous cloud on the social horizon.

The convulsive struggle of the Revolution brought to furious boil many simmering problems. There was the war itself to recover from. The Articles of Confederation, strong enough to hold the states together in time of mutual danger, were now pendulous and weak under the unlooked-for burden of victory. That the thin membrane of confederate government threatened to rupture was well recognized by 1787. There was a great deal of jealous ambition on the part of each state, and the "diplomats" in the Congress were each concerned with the particular rights and privileges of his own state. In short, the Confederation could scarcely be called a government; "it was an assemblage of governments."

In the opaqueness of their inexperience, men tried to separate political issues from social and social from economic, but there was no way of separating them. The common people had little left them save political liberty, which was still something of an abstraction, and land, which was largely devastated. Commerce was gone, and money had all but disappeared. The public debt was $170,000,000. In Massachusetts, two thousand men, led by Daniel Shays, rose up with demands that the collection of debts be suspended. It was a spontaneous rebellion that lasted several weeks. The concept of aristocratic rule was challenged. The common people demanded land reforms and guarantees of human rights. Adding their strident voices to the clamor, anti-slavery men called for an end to human bondage.

Though slavery was only one of the issues that faced the Constitutional
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Convention of 1787, its influence was so pervasive and its resilient fibers had become so entwined about the structure of colonial life that it could not be ignored. Indeed, two questions -- the taxation of imports, and proportional representation -- dragged the slavery issue out in stark and ominous nakedness. It was an ironic and a mixed-up business. For one thing, the Virginia and Maryland delegates stood with the North, where opposition to slavery had grown steadily through the Revolution.

The North argued largely on moral grounds. As a matter of fact, the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, founded in 1775, had prepared a resolution to be presented to the Convention by Benjamin Franklin, president of the Pennsylvania group and a delegate to the Convention. George Mason of Virginia declared that "slavery discourages arts and manufactures. The poor despise labor when performed by slaves.... [Slaves] produce the most pernicious effect on manners. Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant. They bring the judgment of heaven on a Country. As nations can not be rewarded or punished in the next world they must in this. By an inevitable chain of causes and effects providence punishes national sins, by national calamities." The North, where steps had already been taken to end slavery importation, wanted an end put to "the infernal traffic." Counting slaves in the population, Luther Martin, of Maryland, thought, would encourage the traffic, and that it was "inconsistent with the principles of the revolution and dishonorable to the American character to have such a feature [as slavery] in the Constitution."

The South argued largely on economic and political grounds, though Charles Pinckney, a delegate from South Carolina, begged leave to point out that "slavery was justified by the example of the world." John Rutledge, also from South Carolina, declared that "religion and humanity had nothing to do with the slavery question. Interest alone is the governing principle with Nations.... If the Northern States consult their interest, they will not oppose the increase of slaves which will increase the commodities of which they will become the carriers." Pinckney echoed this same thinking: the traffic in slaves is "for the interest of the whole Union. The more slaves, the more produce to employ the carrying trade; the more consumption also, and the more of this, the more of revenue for the common treasury." The South thought slavery consistent with
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the interest of the country, and did not want the traffic stopped by any means. As to the question of proportional representation in Congress, the North which professed to look upon slaves as human beings did not want them counted as part of the population. The South, whose laws had the practical effect of making slaves things, wanted slaves counted on an equality with whites.

The great debate dragged on for four months. It ended less in compromise than in the North's capitulation and in a sweeping victory for the South.

"We The People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility... do ordain and establish..." that:

"Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons."

And that:

"The migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each person."

And that:

"No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due."

The humanitarian light of the Revolution, blown out in the breath of fearful compromise, was not to come on again for almost three-quarters of a century.

Indeed, what had been a happy if partial and fortuitous exercise of equalitarian principle during the Revolution was become a curse by 1790. The presence of so many escaped slaves was embarrassing to the North, now that the Constitution provided that they should be delivered up on demand. In the South the presence of free Negroes was embarrassing, for such Negroes were a constant threat to the
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slaveholders' control. Disaffected Negroes, ran common opinion in the slavery section, were usually free Negroes. Laws to restrict the increase of this class were passed. Most Southern states, following a pattern set by Virginia in 1793, prohibited the immigration of free blacks. In North Carolina the free Negro could not go beyond the county adjoining his home county. Arriving at Southern ports, free colored sailors were not allowed to leave ship, or were beaten and thrown into jail. Restriction, prohibition, proscription. The free Negro could not vote, could not own or carry arms, could not sell certain commodities, could not be employed as a clerk or typesetter, could not obtain credit without the permission of a guardian, could not be without a guardian, could not testify against a white man in court, could not entertain slaves nor be entertained by them. Smothered under the limitations imposed upon him by law, the free Negro might almost as well have been enslaved.

What had happened was that several factors and events had made the South more sensitive about slavery after the Revolutionary War. First of all, the period was one of economic uncertainty. The war had brought heavy losses in personal wealth. The British had carried off "thousands of slaves, helped themselves to costly silver plate... and left many plantation homes in flames." Rice and indigo, with fewer slaves to produce them, were in a state of acute depression. Transportation was badly disorganized; markets scattered and uncertain. The price of slaves was way down. A good female slave advertised as "ripe for child-bearing and strong in wind and limb" could bring no more than two hundred dollars. A good male slave, offered for five hundred dollars, was thought to be over-priced. Tobacco, the great cash crop of Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina, was a glut on the market. The institution of slavery seemed to be in a precarious state of health.

Moreover, the abolitionist, a grim, persistent breed, had never given up. Anti-slavery men like Benjamin Rush and Jeremy Belknap, John Jay and John Filson, David Rice and Robert Pleasants spoke, wrote and made schemes against slavery. "A thousand laws," shouted David Rice, "can never make that innocent which the Divine Law has made criminal; or give them [slaveholders] a right to that which the Divine Law forbids them to claim." In 1794 various local abolitionist groups -- and there were a dozen such from Massachusetts down to Delaware -- formed a cooperate body, and the direction
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and combined force of anti-slavery thought put the South on the moral defensive. It could no longer blame the continuance of American slavery on England. Indeed, aroused by Wilberforce, Sharp and Clarkson, the Mother Country was having anti-slavery troubles of her own.

But also in England something more was happening, and its impact upon the slave economy of the South was to be terrific. Industrialization was happening; coal was happening; steam was happening. The invention of the power loom made the manufacture of great quantities of cloth a matter of throwing an engine switch. All at once the demand for cheap textile fibers rose to a strident pitch. Cotton was the answer, but the preparation of cotton for milling was slow and laborious, by hand. If only a quick way could be found to separate the fiber from seed and stalky trash, cotton would be cheaper than silk or linen and more comfortable and versatile than wool. Just at the right time, wandering down from New England, Eli Whitney built the first cotton gin. Moribund slavery, having a powerful restorative now, took a new lease on life. Cotton meant workers, and workers meant slaves -- more and more slaves as new lands were opened up and more people bowed down to cotton as king.

Just as this development was getting under way however, a hundred thousand slaves rose up in revolt on the French island of Haiti. Within a few weeks they destroyed "200 sugar plantations, 600 coffee plantations" and a like number of cotton and indigo plantations. More than two thousand whites were killed without mercy. The island became a fire-drenched waste. Bryan Edwards, visiting Haiti almost a month after the start of the nightmare, wrote: "We arrived in the harbor of Le Cap at evening... and the first sight which arrested our attention as we approached was a dreadful scene of devastation by fire. The noble plain adjoining Le Cap was covered with ashes, and the surrounding hills, as far as the eye could reach, everywhere presented to us ruins still smoking and houses and plantations at that moment in flames." But after a month, six months, sixteen months, the terrible destruction was not done. It looked as if the Haitian revolutionaries had set in motion a stupendous chain reaction that would blast slavery from the earth. For two years, under their great leader Toussaint L'Ouverture, they struggled unquelled, defeating the British, the Spaniards and the soldiers of
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Napoleon. At last the First Republic granted freedom to all slaves loyal to France.

The bloody vengeance done in Haiti revitalized the South's old fears and gave deep concern to the whole country. Nor did these lessen with the restoration of order in the Caribbean, for that order was of the Negroes' making, and St. Domingo was practically a Black Republic. The potentials in the American situation were plain. Would American slaveholders be driven to the same expediency of granting freedom to the slaves -- and that at a time when the economic promise of slavery was just risen like a golden sun? Thomas Jefferson at least thought this, or worse. "I become daily more and more convinced," he wrote in 1793, "that all the West India Islands will remain in the hands of the people of colour, and a total expulsion of these whites sooner or later will take place. It is high time we should foresee the bloody scenes which our children certainly, and possibly ourselves (south of Potomac), have to wade through, and try to avert them."

Rumors flew. Aided by the French, who were intent upon world conquest, the revolt-freed Haitians were going to invade the United States and set American blacks at liberty. Failing this, picked agents, even then filtering through the South from the ports of New Orleans, Charleston and Baltimore, were to spread sedition among the slaves. Thomas Jefferson, more sagacious than most, and then Secretary of State, had some part in giving these wild reports currency. He wrote the Governor of South Carolina:

A French gentleman, one of the refugees from St. Domingo, informs me that two Frenchmen, from St. Domingo also, of the names Castaing and La Chaise, are about setting out from this place for Charleston, with a design to excite an insurrection among the negroes. He says that this is in execution of a general plan, formed by the Brissotine party at Paris, the first branch of which has been carried into execution at St. Domingo. My informant is a person with whom I am well acquainted, of good sense, discretion and truth, and certainly believes this himself. I inquired of him the channel of his information. He told me it was one which had never been found to be mistaken.... Castaing is described as a small dark mulatto, and La Chaise as a Quatron of a tall fine figure.

Whether these rumors were true or not, credulity was grandsired by fear and given substance by events. Slave revolts and conspiracies
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to revolt broke out like an epidemic in the States. Undoubtedly the news of the Haitian insurrection was partly to blame, but it is also likely that the remembered "spirit and philosophy of the American Revolution were important in arousing... discontent amongst the Negroes." Louisiana, then owned by Spain -- which country was at war with France -- was disturbed by slave uprisings in 1791 and 1792, but not much is known about them. Better known are the slave plots devised in South Carolina. Indeed, the Charleston trouble of 1793, during which fires apparently of incendiary origin blackened part of the city, bears out the warning of Jefferson's letter. A correspondent wrote: "It is said that St. Domingo negroes have sown these seeds of revolt, and that a magazine has been attempted to be broken open." When fires again broke out with fiendish regularity three years later, the seditious connivance of St. Domingo Negroes was further suspected. North Carolina and Maryland were kept constantly alarmed throughout the 1790's.

These outbreaks were hardly quieting to the slaveholders. They were already laboring with problems that seemed insoluble. Their economic hopes were not being realized. In the upper South, the soil was impoverished by the cultivation of tobacco, which crop was itself a drug on the market. Bankrupt planters were a dime a dozen. Plantation fields lay idle; fine old colonial mansions stood deserted. Slaves, grown surly from hunger, loafed in their mouldy cabins, or, tired of this, ran away. Poverty clutched the land. Nor were things better in the lower South, where rice rotted in the swamps and indigo was not worth the cost of cultivation. Still, planters looked upon the times as merely an interlude between promise and fulfillment, and, though some of them gave up, selling or abandoning their holdings and selling or freeing their slaves, most held on.

But if there was a bond in poverty, there was a greater bond in terror, and in 1800, when only the intercession of nature saved Richmond and the surrounding country from the fate of St. Domingo, the South fully realized it. No other slave conspiracy was so well planned as that of Gabriel Prosser's; none, either, came nearer to success.

Gabriel Prosser was no ordinary slave, nor, for that matter, was he an ordinary man. Of giant stature, he possessed the kind of magnetic energy that inspires fanatic confidence in the followers of a leader or a prophet. Gabriel himself had no doubt that he was both.
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His face was a scarred black rock. Like many a revolutionary before and after him, he believed that he was God-intended to bring "a great deliverance" to his people. If this was mystical nonsense, there was none in the planning that went on for months. Aided by his wife, his brothers, and Jack Bowler, another giant Negro, Gabriel recruited from his own district and from Carolina County, Goochland, and Petersburg upwards of a thousand slaves. Some of these, having been in the Revolutionary War, had an elementary knowledge of military tactics, for which reason they were made group leaders. Gabriel supplied them with crude arms -- pikes and bludgeons made of wood, swords made of scythe blades, and a few antiquated guns. Gabriel cautiously sounded out the Catawba Indians, but decided against their help. He planned to steal horses for greater mobility. Finally, satisfied with his planning, he set a time when the fields would be ready for harvest, the cattle fat for slaughter. The insurrectionists would live off the land.

The operation was to begin on the night of August 20. All the whites (save the French and the Quakers) in the neighborhood of the Prosser plantation were to be killed. Picking up hundreds of pledged recruits from the surrounding country and augmented by hundreds -- even thousands -- from the city, the slaves were to descend on Richmond. Gabriel knew the city as well as he knew his master's barn, for he had made it the object of special study every Sunday for months. Once in Richmond, where it was expected that all bondmen would rally to the cause, the slaves were to set fires as a diversionary tactic, seize the arsenal and the State House, put all whites to the sword, and establish a black monarchy with Gabriel as king. Failing in this, they were to take to the mountains and defend themselves to the end. Their flag was to bear the legend "Liberty or Death."

Everything went well -- for a while. No fewer than a thousand slaves kept the rendezvous at Old Brook Swamp, six miles from Richmond. Even the rain that began to fall at dusk was good for the plans of the insurrectionists, for it would keep unsuspecting folk indoors. But the rains came harder, blew a storm, a gale weirdly lit by lightning. Roads turned to goo, bridges were swept away, houses blown down, crops destroyed. Progress toward the city was utterly impossible. Pledged to a later rendezvous, the rebellious slaves scattered.

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It was only later that they knew that they had been betrayed by other than the gods. Two of their own kind had betrayed them. Governor Monroe learned of the plot in the late afternoon of the twentieth. When the slaves kept their rendezvous, the city was already mobilized, the arsenal and State House were guarded. Cavalry troops clattered through the streets trying to cover all points at once. But nothing had happened when the storm broke, and after that nothing could happen.

The next day evidence of the epic scope of the conspiracy poured in and threw city and state into panic. Martial law was declared. The militia went to work, and Negroes were arrested indiscriminately. Some, according to Thomas W. Higginson, were hanged the same way, and almost as soon as caught. Gabriel himself had escaped, and for a time it looked as if the $300 offered for his capture was not enough. But within a month, once again betrayed by his own, Gabriel was discovered hiding in the hold of the schooner Mary which had sailed from Richmond to Norfolk. The outcome of his trial was a foregone conclusion. With fifteen others, Gabriel Prosser was hanged on October 7, 1800, before a wildly cheering mob.

3

But by 1800 the interlude of mere anxious hope was over and the promise of the industrial revolution was being fulfilled. Cotton was truly golden fleece. The area of its production spread to Georgia and Arkansas, and the purchase of Louisiana in 1803 extended it still further. Despite unlimited cultivation, the price of cotton soared, and with it the price of land and slaves. For slaves were as necessary to cotton -- so at least thought the South -- as the very earth that produced it. And there were not enough slaves.

The upheaval in St. Domingo had thoroughly frightened the South. To import slaves, particularly "seasoned" slaves from the Caribbean islands, was to run the risk of servile revolt. North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and Maryland had already passed laws prohibiting slave import. Presumably to help offset this voluntary cutting off and to round up some of the estimated forty-five thousand Negroes who had run away during the war, Congress enacted a fugitive slave law in 1793. But also in the very next year Congress moved to stop the slave trade to foreign ports and to prevent the
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fitting out of foreign slave ships in American yards.

But these measures were largely ineffective after 1800. Cotton was a powerful club. Returns promised to outweigh risks, and the slave trade to the United States continued to flourish. Trafficking under foreign flags, New England traders flouted the law. Southern planters and buyers connived with them. Anti-slavery interests undoubtedly would try to push through prohibitive measures the first moment the Constitution allowed, and slavers raced against the deadline. In the year 1802 alone, it was estimated that twenty thousand Negroes were imported into Georgia and South Carolina. "So little respect seems to have been paid to the existing prohibitory statute," said one member of Congress, "that it may almost be considered as disregarded by common consent."

But the sickening dread of slave revolt, of suddenly waking to find his life at the mercy of a vengeful black mob, still held validity for the average slaveholder. This dread was sometimes magnified by conscience and by the green awareness of what a precious thing was freedom. The Quakers kept conscience alive. They memorialized Congress; they tramped from door to door; and now and then they went to the length of helping slaves escape.

That there were men who needed no such goads is proved by the facts. In 1803, a Virginia planter, William Ludwell Green, set up an estate for the education of his slaves and willed them freedom. A fellow Virginian, Samuel Gist, purchased lands in free Ohio and settled his manumitted slaves upon it. Other slaveholders bought areas in Indiana, Illinois and Michigan and transported their exslaves thither. "I tremble for my country," Thomas Jefferson said, "when I think that God is just," and freed some of his slaves. Then, in 1806, President Jefferson reminded the Congress that the slave trade could be outlawed. In March of the next year a law was passed to prohibit the African slave trade. But the law was practically useless without the cooperation of those very states in which the pro-slavery forces were most powerful and cotton most precious. The wonder crop incited greed. It promised the abundant life; it promised the ease of wealth. The more slaves the more cotton, the more cotton the more land. It was, it seemed, an immutable round upon which even the landless poor aspired to set their weary feet.

So the law got scant observance. Perhaps, as some have held, it "begot a sort of dare-devil spirit on the part of Southern blood...
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to overcome any doubts arising in their minds." But certainly this much is true: it had the effect of increasing the profits of the slave traffic two and threefold. And if by 1820 there were two hundred thousand free Negroes, they were vastly outnumbered by more than a million and a half slaves.

A million five hundred thousand slaves, the property of, roughly, three hundred thousand people, more than three-quarters of whom owned less than five slaves each! The great gray, faceless mass of Southerners owned no slaves. Indeed, though most of them did not realize it, the slave institution was their greatest enemy. It intensified their economic struggle. It deprived them of opportunity and atrophied ambition. Its class-structure pattern was as rigid as that of medieval Europe, and it left the masses powerless to resist. In the final analysis, it robbed them even of resisting will and made them party to their own degradation. Yet one pride was allowed them -- played up, encouraged: they were white after all, and therefore better than the Negroes free or slave. This blinded the majority to the total domination by the slaveholders who determined the South's political and cultural structure, who wrote her laws, who established her mores, who molded the group mind into that sectional oddity known as the mind of the South. It was the slaveholding element that erected an oligarchical superstructure upon the foundation of democracy, and created the fortress of myths within which, it was hoped, the mind of the South could grind out its dream of life in peace.

The threat to the myths reposed in the slaves themselves. It lay in their day to day and hour to hour disaffection -- in their silent, passive, mocking resistance: the dawdling, the pretending to be dumb, the pretending not to see and hear and understand, the pretending to be sick. And in the sudden, explosive leap of violence -- a slave alone, or many together daring to be bold, defiant, murderous, daring to die. This was the threat, the South knew, to its entire economy, its way of life. To contain that threat and to maintain that way of life, it was necessary, as has been said, to hammer out the Black Codes and to enforce them with such persistent stringency that even the freedom of the master class was curtailed. Almost no act of the slave's, either of nature or of will, but was watched, guarded, spied upon. "Go to de woods to relieve yo'se'f, oberseer heel you der. Go to de cabin when work all done an' you try to res', pattyrollers li'ble to bust in. Go to meetin' on Sunday, white mens. Cain't even
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down worshup yo' Gawd. White mens. White mens a-watchin' an' a-lis'nin' all de time."

Declared the highest court of South Carolina in 1818: "The peace of society and the safety of individuals require that slaves should be subjected to the authority and control of all freemen when not under the immediate authority of their masters."

And the slave was subject -- to the guilt-swelled abuse of master and overseer, to the tender mercy of patrollers, to the tricky whim of any white man who chanced to meet him away from home. He had no more social status than a mule. One white witness could convict him in a court of law. For sedition, and often on suspicion of sedition he could be hanged or burned alive. For reading or distributing incendiary literature he could also be put to death. Running away was an offense for which, if he did not yield when caught, his captor could shoot him down.

If a slave were lucky -- and there were degrees of luck -- he might live on a small plantation or farm; or he might be a personal servant in a large household; or he might have a kind master. Sometimes he might have the luck to be in two of these circumstances. If he lived on a small plantation, the chances are that there was no overseer and that he worked side by side with the master and the master's children. Personal contact with his owner was to the slave's advantage. He could prove his value; he could ingratiate himself. Sharing experiences tended to humanize the relationship. The slave worked hard, but so did the master, for on the four- and five-slave places life was an elemental struggle against ruin. On such a place the slave's rations might be short, but "sho't rations wont nothin' to de long cat-o-nine" in the hands of an overseer or a "mean, hard" master.

A body servant had even more intimate contacts with his master, and sometimes these led to deep affection and respect on both sides. The house or body slave had many advantages over the field slave. He was a privileged character, the aristocrat of the slave class, and, more frequently than not, a source of envy to other slaves. Cooking the master's food, serving his table, running his personal errands, laying out his clothes and dressing him, standing always within earshot, the body servant learned many things and met many kinds of people. He grew sophisticated, knowing, arrogant and place-conscious. He generally married on his occupation level, for he despised field hands and "common niggers." He dressed much better,
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ate better, talked better. Coin clinked in his pockets. Sensing that his personal advantage and, indeed, his fate were tied to that of his master, his loyalty was likely to be profound. Moreover, in the unbalanced equation of the Southern culture, master might equal cousin, half-brother, father. Through house slaves many a servile plot came to light, for masters used even the place-jealousies of slaves as instruments of control.

Luckiest of all was the slave who had a kind master. That there were such masters is clearly a part of the record, though many of the contemporary accounts, written by runaway slaves or biased travelers, or ghosted by abolitionists, tended to slight or overlook them. There were masters who were wisely kind, who kept slave families together, who fed and clothed them decently, who forbade cruel punishment. Thomas Jefferson's remaining slaves were "struck dumb" with misery at their master's death, although he had willed them freedom. Thaddeus Herndon, addressing his slaves for the last time, was reported to have said: "Servants, hear me, we have been brothers and sisters, we have grown up together. We have done the best for you. Besides your freedom, we have spent $2,000 in procuring everything we could think of to make you comfortable -- clothing, bedding, implements of husbandry, mechanics' tools, tools for the children, Bibles.... And now, may God bless you. I can never forget you."

There were those masters who were kindly wise -- for profit. But no matter what the souce, kindness was goodness to the slave. If he could escape being sold down the river and ward off the bite of the abasing lash; if he could jump the broomstick with a woman of his choosing, worship God in the way that appealed to him, and be made to feel secure in his old age, he was not likely to examine into reasons. For, anyway, much less than these usually made up the paltry sum of his happiness -- a runt shoat at Christmas, a cracked mirror, a broken watch, a dance.

"Ole Marsa stan' off in de corner wid his arms folded jus' a-puffin' on his corn-cob pipe as ef he was a-sayin' `"Look at my niggers! Ain' my niggers havin' a good time!'... Den ole Missus say to Marsa, `I b'lieve you lak dem niggers better'n you do me.' Den Marsa say, "Sho', I lak my niggers. Dey works hard and makes money fo' me.... I'se gwine stay an' see dat my niggers has a good time.'

"An' we sho' use to have a good time. Yes, sir. We was walkin'
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an' talkin' wid de devil both day an' night. Settin' all 'round was dem big demi-jonahs of wiskey what Marsa done give us. An' de smell of roast pig an' chicken comin' fum de quarters made ev'ybody feel good."

Yet the slave system was against even such small indulgences as these. When all is said and done, the system could not afford them, for charitableness was its enemy as surely as hate is the enemy of love. The South was in the position of the police state, creating oppression and terror in order to function at all. Truly it was a police state, and all its citizens were policemen. Fanny Kemble, the English actress who married a slaveholder and lived for a time (1838 -- 1839) on a plantation in Georgia, remarked on the extent and nature of the South's militarism. A governor of South Carolina declared that "a state of military preparation must always be with us a state of perfect domestic security." And Frederick Law Olmsted, as objective an observer as ever took a journey, wrote in A Journey in the Back Country that one sees in the South

Police machinery such as you never find in towns under free government: citadels, sentries, passports, grapeshotted cannon, and daily public whippings of the subjects for accidental infractions of police ceremonies. I happened myself to see more direct expression of tyranny in a single day and night in Charleston, than at Naples for a week.... There is... an armed force, with a military organization, which is invested with more arbitrary and cruel power than any police state in Europe.

So for all the laws, the final control of the subject black population was by arbitrary men. There were the men of the federal military, and men of the states' militias; police and private guards. In emergencies, there were the headlong, skylarking youths and men of the volunteer vigilantes. But most tyrannous of all these public agencies were the men of the local patrols, the dreaded "pattyrollers." Every community in every slave state had its patrol. In some places its members were drawn from the state militia; in others they were drafted from the body of citizenry and any adult white male was liable to service.

Finally, in private capacity were the overseers, bred of the diseases of slavery. As a class they earned the reputation they got. "Passionate, careless, inhuman, generally intemperate, and totally unfit for the duties of the position," not even the masters, whose creatures they
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were, spoke a good word for them. Yet they were considered indispensable, and the laws of some states made them mandatory. The overseer had over the slave all the rights of control of the master, but none of the master's ultimate responsibility. He ordered, made food and clothing allowances, assigned work and saw to its carrying out, issued passes, punished. He was the gross reflection of the master from whom his authority was derived. The aim of that authority was profit; its means cruelty. "If they [the overseers] made plenty o' cotton, the owners never asked how many niggers they'd killed."

For, of course, sometimes a nigger had to be killed, or maimed, or tortured, or at the very least lashed. The slaves were not inclined to extend themselves for the profit of others. They were lazy and irresponsible, to say which is to point up the way the slave system worked. Every moment of the slaves' day was locked into a routine of almost sidereal precision. The rising horn or bell before day, breakfast in the hushed gloom of morning twilight, the fields at dawn. Plowing, planting, hoeing, chopping, picking. Land to clear, ditches to dig, fences to mend. Noon -- sidemeat, blackstrap molasses, hoecake. The fields again. Supper -- hoecake, blackstrap molasses, cow-peas. And then at night wood to gather, water to draw. In Mississippi slaves could be legally worked eighteen hours in twenty-four; in Georgia and Alabama nineteen. There was no law that said they could not be worked to death.

The slaves had no initiative, no sense of duty; they were dishonest, thriftless, immoral, the planters said. They were "more brute than human... they accepted the white man's civilization only through fear and force of habit; they were mean, restless, and dissatisfied. ... This class of human brute was subdued only through fear, just as the lion is made to perform in the show through fear." They were also stupid and insensate beyond belief.

But the threat to these concepts, too, reposed in the Negroes themselves, slave and free. Benjamin Banneker, for instance, was free, but his remarkable talents, once they came to light, mocked the accepted beliefs. For the first forty years of his life he was just another farmer, with a little more book learning than he actually seemed to need and not enough money and leisure to follow his interests. One thing he had done however: he had made an excellent clock that attracted attention in his local Maryland community.

Then, in the 1780's a Quaker miller, George Ellicott, took an interest
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in Banneker, lent him books on mathematics and astronomy, and gave him the use of surveyor's tools. By 1789 Banneker had proved himself so skilled in the engineering sciences that President Washington appointed him to the Commission to survey the District of Columbia and lay out the city of Washington. For two years Banneker engaged in this work. When he returned to Maryland, his interest in astronomy asserted itself, and, beginning in 1791, he issued an annual almanac which for the eleven years that he published it was a household reference in America and won praise abroad.

But if Banneker's accomplishments proved something, they were not enough entirely to eradicate, as he had hoped, the "false ideas and opinions" generally held about Negroes.

Nor were Paul Cuffe's. Born free, like Banneker, but a New Englander, Cuffe went to sea on a whaler at the age of sixteen. Four years later he bought his first vessel, and by 1780 Paul Cuffe's ships were sailing to Europe and Africa. Increasing wealth made him liable to taxes, but these he refused to pay so long as he could not vote. The philosophy of the Revolution was on his side of the argument, and he presented it convincingly. Largely through his efforts, Massachusetts extended the right to vote to free Negroes who paid taxes.

Cuffe was a Quaker. In common with his sect, he had a concern for the plight of Negroes unbounded by selfish interests. Realizing the importance of education, he built a school in New Bedford. Knowing the self-respect that regular employment promotes, he operated a shipyard and employed Negro mechanics when he could find them. Negro seamen shipped on his vessels. But even these things were not enough to narrow the immeasurable distance to Negro self-sufficiency. Too many social and psychological barriers stood in the middle ground. To be free of these, the Negro must go back to Africa. He must have his own land and his own government and himself be subject to himself. In 1811, sailing his own vessel, Paul Cuffe went to Africa, where at Sierra Leone he made arrangements looking to the establishment of a colony of free Negroes. The prospects must have pleased him, for after the War of 1812, he sailed again to Africa, taking with him at his own expense a shipload of Negroes.

But America was home for the vast majority of Negroes. Here many of them were born, though in slavery. Their sweat was going into its building, their blood was spilling in its defense. Here --
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since to labor and to die were not enough -- they must prove themselves. Here they must confound the concept.

At about the time that Banneker was catching the interest of George Ellicott, a fragilely molded, delicately constituted slave girl in Boston was writing:

Should you, my lord, while you peruse my song,
Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung,
Whence flow these wishes for the common good,
By feeling hearts alone best understood,
I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate
Was snatched from Afric's fancied happy seat:
What pangs excrutiating must molest,
What sorrows labor in my parent's breast!
Steeled was that soul, and by no misery moved,
That from a father seized his babe beloved:
Such, such my case. And can I then but pray
Others may never feel tyrannic sway?

This was not Phillis Wheatley's first poem. In 1770, when she was seventeen, she had written one "On the Death of the Reverend George Whitefield," and in 1775, during the British siege of Boston, she had addressed General Washington in heroic couplets:

Proceed, great chief, with virtue on thy side,
Thy every action let the goddess guide.
A crown, a mansion, and a throne that shine,
With gold unfading, Washington, be thine. And later the General had received her at his headquarters in Cambridge. For Phillis was an oddity, especially to a slaveholder from Virginia. She was a slave who could read and write poetry. She was an artist!

Bought in Boston directly off a slave ship from Senegal, Phillis was reared in the pious and cultured home of the John Wheatleys. She was treated more like a member of the family -- which at one time numbered seven -- than a slave. She was taught to read from the Bible and given lessons in Latin, history, and geography. Voluminous reading helped to make her at eighteen undoubtedly one of the most cultured women of her day. Manumitted and sent to London
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for her health at twenty, she was entertained by the Countess of Huntington, and Brook Watson, the Lord Mayor, made her a gift of a handsome edition of Paradise Lost, now the property of Harvard College. It was in London also that Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, Phillis' first volume, was published. Later the book had many reprintings in America. It was used as a strong argument against the Negro's inherent inferiority in the anti-slavery campaign of the next century.

Returned to America, Phillis found life much less pleasant than it had been. Freedom was precious, but freedom was hard. Mrs. Wheatley was dead, and Mary, the surviving daughter, married. Mr. Wheatley himself died in 1778. Phillis knew little of the real world. The promises of the facile rascal whom she married proved empty, and bit by bit she was reduced to drudgery for the sake of her three children, two of whom soon died. Her own end is told by the anonymous writer of the Memoirs of Phillis Wheatley.

In a filthy apartment, in an obscure part of the metropolis, lay the dying mother and child. The woman who had stood honored and respected by the wise and good in that country which was hers by adoption, or rather compulsion, who had graced the ancient halls of old England, and had rolled about in the splendid equipages of the proud nobles of Britain, was now numbering the last hours of her life in a state of the most abject misery, surrounded by all the elements of squalid poverty.

The Boston Independent Chronicle noted simply:

Last Lord's Day, died Mrs. Phillis Peters (formerly Phillis Wheatley), aged thirty-one, known to the world by her celebrated miscellaneous poems. Her funeral is to be held this afternoon, at four o'clock, from the house lately improved by Mr. Todd, nearly opposite Dr. Bulfinch's at West Boston, where her friends and acquaintances are desired to attend.

The date was Thursday, December 9, 1784.

This was the very year in which Richard Allen, who had bought his freedom in 1777 and become an inspiring preacher, began attracting the attention of white Methodism. Moving from Delaware to Philadelphia a decade later, he joined the St. George Church, where he was sometimes called upon to preach. But St. George's was a white congregation and there were those among it who objected
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to worshipping with Negroes. Once at a service Allen's prayers were interrupted by church officials who were determined to enforce the new policy of segregation. Allen resolved to establish his own church.

In 1794 he opened the doors of Bethel Church -- now known as Mother Bethel -- in Philadelphia, and within ten years branches of this church were running in North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey and Delaware. By 1816, when they incorporated as the African Methodist Episcopal Church, they had a combined membership of forty-five thousand Negroes.

Negro Protestants in other places, stymied by segregation, also established separate churches during the late 1700's. In New York James Varick, Peter Williams and Christopher Rush were instrumental in setting up the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. In the South where, after the Revolutionary War, there was determined opposition to Negro congregations under Negro leaders, who might be refractory, black Baptists set up a church in Savannah, Georgia, and kept it alive even though they were persecuted and Andrew Bryan, their preacher, was jailed. The African Baptist Church of Williamsburg, Virginia, was driven underground, but William Moses and Gowan Pamphlet, free Negroes, continued to serve it until the "black laws," following Nat Turner's bloody rebellion in 1830, stopped the mouths of all Negro preachers in Virginia.

The education of colored people was even harder to accomplish in the South, though, strangely enough perhaps, the first American-born Negro to be thoroughly educated lived most of his life in that section. Born in North Carolina, John Chavis was sent to Princeton (then the college of New Jersey) where he seems to have been taught by the president of the college, Dr. Witherspoon. Returning to North Carolina, Chavis taught for thirty years a school which white boys attended by day and Negro boys at night. He was forced to relinquish his service to Negro boys in 1831, when the education of colored people was generally interdicted in the South.

There was also more than a little opposition to it in the North. It was expensive. It did not seem necessary to a people who were doomed to the lowliest occupations: it could only make them unhappy. Yet, with the aid of some philanthropic whites, Negroes did get a yeasty taste of formal learning. As early as 1777 the Philadelphia Quaker, Anthony Benezet, provided funds for a colored school.
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There were off-and-on schools in New Jersey. The African Free School in New York taught hundreds of Negroes between 1787 and 1815. One of its students, Ira Aldridge, won European acclaim by his playing of Othello to Edmund Kean's Iago. Whites in Wilmington, Delaware, New Haven, Connecticut, and Boston, Massachusetts, lent support to Negro schools. By 1826, the year of Thomas Jefferson's death, the race had its first bona-fide graduate of an American college in John Russworm, who finished at Bowdoin, and there were ex-slaves who were practicing medicine, teaching school, and preaching sermons to attentive white audiences.

If these lives and works were no clinching proof of anything, they at least were an earnest, and they at least gave some people pause. Jefferson, whose humanitarian interest in the Negro's welfare did not stop him from holding the usual notions about the race's imperviousness to civilizing influences, was impressed by Banneker's accomplishments. He praised the black man's almanac. Indeed, since he sent it to the Academy of Science in Paris, it is not too much to say that he valued it as the product of an American mind. Washington, who had believed black men unworthy to fight in the country's cause, must have been struck by Phillis Wheatley, by the shaping influence of Anglo-Saxon culture upon her. In the deep South too -- in Charleston, Savannah and New Orleans -- many must have seen beyond the blinders of the concept. Many must have wondered how a people "so stupid, so bereft of mental endowment" could build with axe and adz and simple facing tools fine mansions for their masters, shape stone to monuments of arresting beauty, and forge and anvil iron with subtle artistry.

And ever and again, "insensible as they were of the high dreams of honor and liberty that inspire white men to grandeur," slaves made bold efforts to assert their human dignity. They ran away to freedom. Between them and it stood all the machinery of control, all the pathological watchfulness of frightened masters. Between them and it sucked the ooze of primordial swamps, prowled the shadows of unknown forests, roared rivers, reared mountains. Between slaves and freedom screamed torture, crept starvation, lurked death -- yet they ran away. Many thousands ran away.