Fighting Slavery on Slaveholders' Terrain PDF

Fighting Slavery on Slaveholders' Terrain Author(s): Thavolia Glymph Source: OAH Magazine of History , Apr., 2009, Vol. 23, No. 2, Antebellum Slavery (Apr., 2009), pp. 37-41 Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of Organization of American Historians Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stabl...

Fighting Slavery on Slaveholders' Terrain Author(s): Thavolia Glymph Source: OAH Magazine of History , Apr., 2009, Vol. 23, No. 2, Antebellum Slavery (Apr., 2009), pp. 37-41 Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of Organization of American Historians Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40505986 REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40505986?seq=1&cid=pdf- reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Organization of American Historians and Oxford University Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to OAH Magazine of History This content downloaded from 192.231.40.123 on Thu, 07 Nov 2024 19:19:28 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  Thavolia Glymph Fighting Slavery on Slaveholders' Terrain the course of two and a half centuries, slaveholders on labor in their previous homes, including (at least initially) the ability to the North American mainland came to preside over the larg- mobilize collectively to deflect slaveholders' power. "Consequently the est, wealthiest and most powerful slave society in the Atlantic slaves were driven hard, early and late, to clea[r] the land for King Cot- world (i). Until their destruction as a class, they exercised power and ton," John Parker recalled. "There was no letup in the driving. Forests authority far disproportionate to their numbers. By i860, a mere 7 were literally dragged out by the roots. It was into this situation that the percent of the total white population of the South owned 75 percent of men and women of our caravan were hurled" (4). Adjustment to new the slaves. Slaveholding power rested on the power of the nation-state labor regimes that accompanied the sale or movement of slaves to the and an array of economic institutions - from banks and merchant cotton frontier threatened to eviscerate every hard-won right that had houses to factories, railroads, and shipping concerns - and from an come to define life and labor in the older regions. As slavery expanded unprecedented growth of the slave population. It likewise derived with a force and violence that seemed unstoppable, slave resistance from a disproportionate control of the federal government: by the could easily seem for naught (5). time of the Civil War, 11 out of 16 presi- Yet slaveholders' control was always contin- dents, 17 of 28 Supreme Court justices, gent. Despite the backbreaking work that greeted 14 of 19 attorneys-general, and 23 of 33 them on arrival in the Deep South, the nation's speakers of the House had come from enslaved people never ceased to challenge their slaveholding states (2). Yet, the power of status as chattel property, mounting protests big slaveholders was less than it aimed and and small. As Ira Berlin writes, "while slaveown- claimed to be. Reliant as the system was ers held most of the good cards in this meanest on black people's labor, slaves were both of all contests, slaves held cards of their own" the source of slaveholders' strength and (6). Each card the slaves played tore at the fabric their Achilles' heel. By the late antebel- of slaveholding ideology and its on-the-ground lum period, at the height of its vaunted practices. At the same time, the hand each party strength, the slavery regime amounted drew in the contest was played out under circum- on the ground to a patchwork of prac- stances particular to time and place, and demo- tices born of ceaseless negotiations graphic configurations. between the enslaved and enslavers, This meant, first and foremost, that the strate- processes that at once recognized and gies enslaved people had developed in the upper, restrained slaveholders' power and black older, and seaboard South in the years before the people's claims to freedom. rise of cotton would not necessarily work equally As slaveholders gained in numbers as well on Deep South terrain. Forced resettle- and strength in the years following in- ment damaged friendships and other social con- dependence - and as the territory under nections. Successful resistance, after all, often their direct control spread into the South- required trusted allies: people who could keep se- west - the terrain of struggle shifted, crets and share valuable information. Success also bending and responding to demographic required knowing something about the places into changes, the opening of new lands, and which slavery so rudely deposited them. As North international diplomacy. The shift was Carolina born Wallace Turnage discovered, unfa- felt particularly acutely by those hun- miliarity with the social and physical geography dreds of thousands who were uprooted"In the Cotton Field." 1863. (Image courtesy of Library of his new home in lower Alabama, the place to by the domestic slave trade and carried of Congress, LC-USZ62-28493.) which he was sold as a teenager, greatly hampered into Alabama, Mississippi, and onwards his ability to return on his own to his natal home. toward Texas. Counting those sold locally, over two million slaves traded In his case, it took four aborted attempts and the outbreak of war be- hands and homes during the antebellum period. This new uprootingfore he managed to learn enough about his Alabama surroundings - its and separation meant the destruction of families, friendships, and com- swamps, its forests, its people, and above all, the names and locations of munities that had been built over decades. Trade and forced migrationallies - for flight to become a viable option (7). too often meant the sale of wives, husbands, and children as individu- Some strategies, however, were successfully exported by slaves als. After all, as W. E. B. Du Bois explained in the early part of the lastfrom the upper, older, and seaboard South to the lower, newer, and century, those who purchased slaves "were not buying families, theyinterior South. Thus even as slaveholders won the right to determine were buying workers" (3). whether a slave lived or died, how much she ate, whom she married, Nor did the trauma end there. With their families in tatters, new ar-what she wore, what work she did, how her children were brought into rivals lost many of the hard-won rights that had come to define life andthe world and cared for, and how she was buried, through the force of OAH Magazine of History · April 2009 37 This content downloaded from 192.231.40.123 on Thu, 07 Nov 2024 19:19:28 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms personal dominion backed by statute and local police power, America's slipped out of an owner's sight in order to register an objection to the forced migrants fought back. Drawing on a store of collective and per- work regime, an unjust punishment, or inadequate rations. Always a sonal experiences, on a shared language, and on the knowledge that dangerous proposition, given the control slaveholders and their allies it was their labor (and in the case of women, their reproductive capac- wielded over government and police institutions, flight could redound ity) that slaveholders valued most - information that could, under the in black people's favor. It certainly did for Benjamin Montgomery who, right circumstances tip balances of power - enslaved women and men in return for a promise never to run away again, received permission struggled to preserve what they could of their old lives. In lowcountry from his master Joseph Davis (the brother of Jefferson Davis) to "learn South Carolina, for example, a combination of ecological and social cir- to read and write, earn money, and manage a store" (12). Slaves also cumstances had left slaves isolated on plantations and freer to build took to their feet to reunite with the husbands, wives, and children a world in which they exercised significant control over the pace of they had been forcibly parted from by migration and sale. Maryland- work and greater latitude to build their own cultural referents. In these born Charles Ball did this not once, but twice; he was that determined places and in other long-settled areas, slaves had put up fences around to live with the woman and children for whom his "heart yearned" (13). those hard-won rights (8). The methods slaves used to open Like a group of slaves who migrated up space for themselves by circum- from lowcountry to interior Georgia, scribing the power of their owners some were able to carry this history into were limited only by historical cir- the new cotton kingdom where they cumstances and imagination. Thus placed it on the table as a starting point while resistance, like slavery itself, for new negotiations. In a sharp depar- was time- and date-stamped and ture from the gang labor regime that varied from place to place, the range characterized production in their new of options could be wide at any given home, those enslaved Georgians man- time. Henry Bibb, for example, at- aged to convince their owner to retain tempted to exert control over his the system of labor to which they had life by exerting control over his sale. become accustomed in their previous After first identifying a man who he home. "In all Kinds of work where such thought might make a lenient or at a thing can be done I wish my people least tolerable master, Bibb set out to tasked" E. D. Hueguenin instructed his lure him in by shaping his answers overseer shortly after the group's reset- to the white man's questions in self- tlement. Such an arrangement he went serving ways. "He told the man that on to explain, "answers more than one he was happily married to a woman good purpose" (9). who was also for sale (which was As the forced migrants came to true), that he was illiterate (which know their new homes and the people was not true), and that he had only who occupied them, they began to push Wallace Turnage Historic Site marker, African-American Heritage Trail, run away once (which was half back even harder, struggling to reclaim Mobile, Alabama. (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.) true)" (14). April, who later changed from their owners scraps of control over his name to William Ellison, capital- their lives and their labor. Often they did this simply by withholding ized on his early training as a cotton gin maker to accumulate enough their labor, slowing the line, for example, when the owner or overseer funds to buy himself and eventually his family from slavery, and then was not looking or perhaps by breaking tools. On the nation's sugar to open a shop in upcountry South Carolina from which he operated plantations, where even a few days lost at the height of harvest could his own very lucrative gin building and repair business (15). spoil the year's crop, slaves' ability to withhold labor could be especial- Solomon Northup, who learned to play the fiddle before being kid- ly devastating. A Louisiana slave named Old Pleasant knew this, and napped into slavery, turned those occasions when his master rented when in the middle of boiling the cane juice into sugar (a laborious but him out "to play at a ball or festival for whites" into opportunities to necessary process), Pleasant "suffered the water in the boilers to get" learn about his new surroundings and to improve the quality of his low and cause steam "to escape with violence," he brought production day-to-day life. "Alas! had it not been for my beloved violin," Northup to a screeching halt. "It took five days to repair damages," grumbled later admitted, "I scarcely can conceive how I could have endured the his master. By then "the syrup in the tanks and filters got sour and we long years of bondage." Music "introduced me to great houses - re- made sugar of inferior quality for several days" (10). "Of course" indi- lieved me of many days' labor in the field - supplied me... with pipes viduals like Pleasant acted as they did, Du Bois tried to explain to an and tobacco, and extra pairs of shoes, and often times led me away audience that largely ignored him, reminding the incredulous of what from the presence of a hard master." Most important, the violin an- was really at stake: resistance "was the answer of any group of laborers nounced that its owner was a person, not property. It "heralded my forced down to the last ditch. They might be made to work continu- name around the country - made me friends, who, otherwise would ously but no power could make them work well." It was a truism that not have noticed me" (16). slaveholders confronted on a near endless basis (11). Yet, the fact remains that the activities of slaves, the havoc they oc- Slaves refused to fulfill planters' dreams of what slaves should be casionally raised, and the challenges they relentlessly posed for their in many more ways. Thousands, predominantly men, did this through owners were insufficient to overthrow the system of slavery. Indeed, flight. While the vast majority of fugitives never escaped bondage en- Nat Turner's cataclysmic 1831 revolt in Southampton County, Virginia, tirely, and while historians still have no clear idea how many actu- marked the last large scale revolt to rock American slaveholders until ally ran away, flight was one of the most widespread means by which the outbreak of Civil War. The absence of a Haitian-style revolution slaves sought to claim back what slaveholders most wanted to com- on antebellum American soil can be ascribed in part to demography. mand: their labor. "Laying out" was the common term for those who Excluding the lowcountry region of Georgia and South Carolina and 38 OAH Magazine of History · April 2009 This content downloaded from 192.231.40.123 on Thu, 07 Nov 2024 19:19:28 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms a few of Louisiana's sugar-producing parishes, enslaved women and for shorter periods of time (22). From the owners' perspective, distance men never constituted an absolute majority. They lived instead on a and time mattered little, for it was work stoppage and insolence none- landscape that was "shot through with white people," few of whom theless, just as slave women understood it to be. To get them back into were friends of the slave (17). the fields, the nursery, or kitchen, masters and mistresses bargained The rapid growth of the slave population, one made possible by and compromised, agreeing to improve working conditions or to cancel "natural" means, additionally discouraged armed rebellion. To act the sale of a child or spouse. "Come home now," Charles Manly ap- against the slave regime not only risked suffering the weight of a law pealed to a fugitive woman named Bertha, and he would permit her to disproportionately controlled by slaveholders, it also posed an enor- "hire herself out in the neighborhood" (23). mous risk to the rebel's immediate family, for owners seldom hesitated While the few rebellions that were mounted on antebellum to use bonds of affection as their own form of leverage. "We have met American soil - the 1811 German Coast uprising, Gabriel Prosser's with a trader who has a negro woman he purchased lately of a citizen and Turner's - paled in comparison to those unleashed by Caribbean of Algiers," a pair of New Orleans businessmen wrote to a Mississippi and South American slaves, that kind of heroic narrative of resistanc planter. "The reason he assigns for her master's selling such an invalu- was not, however, the end to the story. The rebellion led by Gabri able servant" was that her hus- Prosser, for example, failed; band "was a great rascal & stole but it revealed the contours of from him to such an extent that a world made by slaves and the he was induced to part with world of slaveholders that the the woman... a first rate cook, rebels sought to destroy (24). washer and ironer" (18). Turner's rebellion forced a legal The limits on slave action response felt far beyond South- arose in the quarters, too. Ten- ampton County (25). But it was sions shot through and divided that everyday resistance - those slaves from one another, as acts of political expression such well as from their owners. Take as broken tools, surly responses, runaways, for example. No dragging feet, an avowed re- account fails to demonstrate fusal to let slavery stand in the just how vital the support of way of family, even a Sabbath friends and acquaintances was day prayer (a gesture that could to their survival and success, potentially level the hierarchies Harriet Jacobs's narrative be- of slaveholding society) - that ing the classic example. As her was in fact central to making ordeal demonstrated, fugitivesAfrican Americans pointing guns at slavecatchers. Illustration from William Still's in which slaves could a world needed allies who would pro-The Underground Railroad, 1872. (Image courtesy of Library of Congress, moreLC- comfortably live. Those vide them with food and shel- USZ62-76205.) activities and expressions, those ter; they also needed allies who would not divulge hiding places (19). "small acts with sometimes outsized consequences, were what Du Yet runaways could also threaten the meticulously built but fragile Bois meant with his "Of course" (26). spaces that bondpeople claimed. Support, therefore, was not guaran- While often waged by slaves on their own, their collective impact teed. Those deemed "strangers," with no kin, friends, or other local or carried import far beyond the individual act. Thus while a single day neighborhood connections, might find themselves cut adrift or even lost in the master's field, the theft of a chicken, the cock of a head to turned over to white authorities by other slaves. "It was one thing" to catch a word whispered between white people did not lead to the im- risk a beating, a sale, or worse for someone a slave knew, loved, and mediate destruction of slavery, they often led to negotiations, or put trusted. It was "quite another to do so for a stranger," a choice that did on the floor for renegotiation, adjustments to labor and living condi- not redound in Jim Hanes's favor when he ran away from his Missis- tions that could affect all on the plantations, and sometimes beyond. A sippi owner. Caught by two enslaved strangers when he broke into a slave woman fighting for time to nurse a newborn child left the fields cabin on their plantation while looking for food, his captors "talked of without permission to attend to that child knowing that she was not burning him right there on the spot" (20). the first to have done so; likewise the runaway who hid out in a nearby Women were especially constrained in terms of their options. They thicket or swamp acted with a confidence born of knowing others had did cultivate tactics of disobedience and create networks of women on done, or were doing, something similar - and successfully too. Pro- the basis of their own notions of family, friendship, and community tests built upon protests. Individual acts of resistance were forged into as an integral part of their struggle to defeat slaveholders' attempts to a collective struggle that allowed the enslaved to claim for themselves count them as mere beasts of burden. But they also understood that bits and pieces of their lives. It was, by extension, an inherently politi- the ground upon which they stood and fought was much narrower and cal struggle. For with each successful effort made by those slaves, they more confined than it was for enslaved men. For reasons that grew in tipped the balances of antebellum power, remaking slaveholders' ter- part out of the particular labor demands of the South's premier staple rain - and a slaveholders' nation - into a less formidable place. crops and in part out of their role as mothers, women traveled less often Enslaved women and men did not destroy the institution of slav- then men and were thus less familiar with local and regional terrain. ery prior to the Civil War. But what they had accomplished and what However, they were not rendered immobile. Many owners, after all, did they had learned in the process was instrumental when the war fi- insist on taking personal servants with them when they traveled to the nally broke out. Wartime resistance was but the fruit of decades of ac- North on business or pleasure, a custom that shuttled Mum Phebe be- tion that had forged a political perspective, a "slaves' politics." Fragile tween Georgia and Rhode Island for years (21). But the circumstances though it was and as difficult as it is to measure today, slaves' con- of antebellum enslavement did mean that, in general, those women tinuous effort to mark themselves as human was, as Steven Hahn who ran away usually hewed closer to home than men and stayed out concludes, "the most basic and the most profound of political acts in OAH Magazine of History · April 2009 39 This content downloaded from 192.231.40.123 on Thu, 07 Nov 2024 19:19:28 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Cabin used by slaves as a church on Boone Plantation in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. Now part of a living history museum, Boone Hall Plantation uses this cabin, along with seven others to present different aspects of black history. Visitors learn about how slaves worked and lived as well as the struggles they faced. This photograph was taken between 1936 and 1938. (Image courtesy of Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-iO72i8.) which they engaged." It was a politics characterized by "stealth and in- 7. David W. Blight, A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom including direction, with postures and fictions, with choreographed rituals and Their Own Narratives of Emancipation (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2007), 1, 55-89. competitive scrambles," and sometimes "explosive force" (27). In the 8. Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet, 35-36. See also Charles B. Dew, Bond of Iron: end, the "stealth and indirection... postures and fictions... rituals Master and Slave at Buffalo Forge (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1994) and competitive scrambles," were the explosive force, the political acts and Barbara J. Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland that made slave politics comprehensible and visible to all who made during the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). their lives on the terrain of slavery. □ 9. O'Donovan, Becoming Free in the Cotton South, 2S-26. 10. Richard Follett, The Sugar Masters: Planters and Slaves in Louisiana's Cane Endnotes World, 1820-1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), 146. 11. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 40. 1. It bears keeping in mind that in i860, two-thirds of all men in the U.S. 12. John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the with estates of $100,000 or more were slaveholders. Robert William Fogel, Plantation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 97-123, quote on 104. Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New 13. Charles Ball, A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, a Black York: Norton, 1989), 84. Man, Who Lived Forty Years in Maryland, South Carolina and Georgia, as a 2. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (1935; repr., Slave Under Various Masters, and was One Year in the Navy with Commodore New York: Atheneum, 1973), 45-47- Barney, During the Late War (New York: John E. Tyler, 1837), 387, available 3. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 43. online at. 4. Stuart Seely Sprague, ed., His Promised Land: The Autobiography of John P. 14. Johnson, Soul by Soul, 177-78. Parker, Former Slave and Conductor on the Underground Railroad (New York: 15. Michael Johnson and James L. Roark, Black Masters: A Free Family of Color W. W. Norton, 1996), 30. in the Old South (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1986). 5. Brenda Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the 16. Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Slave South (New York: Oxford, 1996), 204-05, 223-25; Edward E. Baptist, Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in Middle Florida's Plantation Frontier before the Civil War (Chapel Hill: 185} (New York: Auburn & Derby, 1853), 216-217, available online at