It is difficult to generalize about the peculiar institution because so much depended on the individual master’s behavior. Although some ex-slaves told of masters who refused to whip them, Bennet Barrow of Louisiana, a harsh master, averaged one whipping a month. “The great secret of our success,” another planter recalled years later, “was the great motive power contained in that little instrument.” Overseers were commonly instructed to give twenty lashes for ordinary offenses, such as shirking work or stealing, and thirty-nine for more serious offenses, such as running away. Sometimes slaves were whipped to death; by 1821, however, all southern states had passed laws allowing a master to be charged with murder if he caused a slave’s death from excessive punishment. Conviction normally resulted in a fine. In 1840 a South Carolina woman convicted of killing a slave was fined $214.28.
Most owners provided adequate clothing, housing, and food for their slaves. Only a fool or a sadist would fail to take care of such valuable property. However, vital statistics indicate that infant mortality among slaves was twice the white rate, life expectancy at least five years less.
On balance, it is significant that the United States was the only nation in the Western Hemisphere where the slave population grew by natural increase. After the ending of the slave trade in 1808, the black population increased at nearly the same rate as the white. Put differently, during the entire period from the founding of Jamestown to the Civil War, only a little more than half a million slaves were imported into the country, about 5 percent of the number of Africans carried by slavers to the New World. Yet in 1860 there were about 4 million blacks in the United States.
This slave burial service, painted by John Antrobus in I860, reflects an inversion of power relations, a slave preacher leads the mourners while the white overseer and the plantation owners watch uneasily, shunted (literally) to the sides.
Most owners felt responsibilities toward their slaves, and slaves were dependent on and in some ways imitative of white values. However, powerful fears and resentments, not always recognized, existed on both sides. The plantation environment forced the two races to live in close proximity. From this circumstance could arise every sort of human relationship. One planter, using the appropriate pseudonym Clod Thumper, could write, “Africans are nothing but brutes, and they will love you better for whipping, whether they deserve it or not.” Another, describing a slave named Bug, could say, “No one knows but myself what feeling I have for him. Black as he is we were raised together.” One southern white woman tended a dying servant with “the kindest and most unremitting attention.” Another, discovered crying after the death of a slave she had repeatedly abused, is said to have explained her grief by complaining that she “didn’t have nobody to whip no more.”
Such diametrically conflicting sentiments often existed within the same person. And almost no whites had difficulty exploiting the labor of slaves for whom they felt genuine affection.
Slaves were without rights; they developed a distinctive way of life by attempting to resist oppression and injustice while accommodating themselves to the system. Their marriages had no legal status, but their partnerships seem to have been loving and stable. Even families whose members were sold to different masters often maintained close ties over considerable distances.
Slave religion, on the surface an untutored form of Christianity tinctured with some African infusions, seemed to most slave owners a useful instrument for teaching meekness and resignation and for providing harmless emotional release, which it sometimes was and did. However, religious meetings, secret and open, provided slaves with the opportunity to organize, which led at times to rebellions and more often to less drastic ways of resisting white domination. Religion also sustained the slaves’ sense of their own worth as beings made in the image of God, and it taught them, therefore, that while human beings can be enslaved in body, their spirits cannot be enslaved without their consent.
Observing that slaves often seemed happy and were only rarely overtly rebellious, whites persuaded themselves that most blacks accepted the system without resentment and indeed preferred slavery to the uncertainties of freedom. There was much talk about “loyal and faithful servants.” The Civil War, when slaves flocked to the Union lines once assured of freedom and fair treatment, would disabuse them of this illusion.
As the price of slaves rose and as northern opposition to the institution grew more vocal, the system hardened perceptibly. White Southerners made much of the danger of insurrection. When a plot was uncovered or a revolt took place, instant and savage reprisals resulted. In 1811, Charles Deslondes led a rebellion of several hundred slaves, armed with tools, who burned a handful of plantations and marched toward New Orleans before being routed by the United States Army. Over fifty slaves were slaughtered immediately; a tribunal of plantation owners ordered the execution of several dozen more. Most were decapitated, their heads left to rot on poles along the Mississippi as a grim warning. In 1822, after the conspiracy of Denmark Vesey was exposed by informers, thirty-seven slaves were executed and another thirty-odd deported, although no overt act of rebellion had occurred.
The Nat Turner revolt in Virginia in 1831 was the most sensational of the slave uprisings; fifty-seven whites lost their lives before it was suppressed. White Southerners treated runaways almost as brutally as rebels, although they posed no real threat to whites. The authorities tracked down fugitives with bloodhounds and subjected captives to merciless lashings.
After the Nat Turner revolt, interest in doing away with slavery vanished in the white South. The southern states made it increasingly difficult for masters to free their slaves; during 1859 only about 3,000 in a slave population of nearly 4 million were given their freedom.
Slavery did not flourish in urban settings, and cities did not flourish in societies where slavery was important. Most southern cities were small, and within them, slaves made up a small fraction of the labor force. The existence of slavery goes a long way toward explaining why the South was so rural and why it had so little industry. Slaves were much harder to supervise And control in urban settings. Individual slaves were successfully employed in southern manufacturing plants, but they made up only an insignificant fraction of the South’s small industrial labor supply.
Southern whites considered the existence of free blacks undesirable, no matter where they lived. The mere fact that they could support themselves disproved the notion that African Americans were by nature childlike and shiftless, unable to work efficiently without white guidance. From the whites’ point of view, free blacks set a bad example for slaves. In a petition calling for the expulsion of free blacks from the state, a group of South Carolinians noted that slaves
Continualy have before their eyes, persons of the same color. . . freed from the control of masters, working where they please, going where they please, and expending their money how they please.
Many southern states passed laws aimed at forcing free blacks to emigrate, but these laws were not well enforced. There is ample evidence that the white people of, say, Maryland, would have liked to get rid of the state’s large free-black population. Free blacks were barred from occupations in which they might cause trouble—no free black could be the captain of a ship, for example—and they were required by law to find a “respectable” white person who would testify as to their “good conduct and character.” But whites, who needed slave labor, did not try very hard to expel them.
•••-[Read the Document A Catechism for Slaves at Www. myhistorylab. com
•••-[Read the Document Turner, The Confessions of Nat Turner at Www. myhistorylab. com
((••—[Hear the Audio When the Roll Is Called up Yonder at Www. myhistorylab. com
•••-[Read the Document Runaway Slave Advertisements a Www. myhistorylab. com
World History
