"For in a warm climate, no man will labour for himself who can make another labour for him. This is so true, that of the proprietors of slaves a very small proportion indeed are ever seen to labor. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God?
—Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia
The story of life on the slave plantation in the antebellum South has been told, retold, and told yet again as historians have struggled to wrestle the truth out of a reality that was difficult to understand even in its own time. While a great deal has been written about the history of the "peculiar institution," uncovering the details of life among the slave population has proved to be elusive, for various reasons.
First, the history of slavery in the American South was often portrayed inaccurately both by those familiar with the institution and those opposed to it. The strongest defenders of slavery saw it as a positive good and in keeping with God's order of things. Those who sought to abolish slavery condemned it as an unmitigated evil. From both ends of that spectrum, exaggerated descriptions of slavery were likely to occur. In fact, there is no single description of slavery that suits every situation or every region of the South. Slavery in the border states of Maryland, Virginia and Kentucky, for example, was not likely to be as harsh as slavery in the deep South, farther from free territory, in areas where larger plantations existed.
To complicate the matter further, interpretations and reinterpretations of the history of slavery have been driven by scholarly and social trends, with the result that descriptions of the institution have often been biased in favor of the point of view of the writer. In addition, while voluminous records of life in the South exist, those records are incomplete or underrepresentative of certain aspects of slavery. For example, the large majority of slave owners owned relatively small farms and few slaves. The average number of slaves per plantation was about ten, but that number must be reckoned against a substantial number of plantations on which a hundred or more slave laborers existed. On smaller plantations there was a high likelihood that the plantation owner might been less than fully literate or too busy to keep detailed records. The small slave-owner's relationship with his slaves was likely to be less harsh than on farms where larger numbers of slaves were supervised by overseers responsible to the master. Furthermore, records of mistreatment of slaves, beatings of slaves of both sexes, the rape of slave women and other abuses were unlikely to be recorded in detail, if at all.
In the years both before and after the Civil War, a mythology grew up around the institution of slavery in the South. The image portrayed in the famous 1939 film Gone with the Wind, with the kind "Massa" looking after his "contented darkies," surrounded by gallant young men and radiant Southern belles, each attended by a loving black "Mammy," persisted for generations. A passive slave culture persisted in the minds of many, but the reality was that slavery was almost always harsh and cruel under the best of circumstances.
Another image of the antebellum South was of the poorest whites, often called "crackers" or "poor white trash," who lived in ignorance and degeneracy in a system that depended upon slavery. Many of those poor whites lived in the hill country away from the cotton areas.
Their existence was affected by poor nutrition and resulting bad health. Although they had no stake in the slave system, they nevertheless supported racial division because despite their lowly status, they were still able to look down on blacks.
A reasonably prosperous middle-class of white farmers and businessmen also contented themselves with the labor system of the South, as many of them hoped to move into the slave-owning planter class when they became prosperous enough.
Because the bulk of Southern capital was invested in land, cotton and slaves, the Southern economy had distinct features that centered around life on the plantation. Both black and white women had considerable responsibilities in running the plantation The image of a leisurely life for wives of prosperous plantation owners belongs to the mythology of the Southern culture. Because slaves were valuable property, the white women on the plantation family were obliged to devote their time to the care of their slaves, often administering basic medical treatment and assisting with the births of slave children. The irony of the reality that children born to slave women often had white fathers, who might be husbands or sons of the plantation mistress, was generally suppressed; such wives generally suffered in silence.
What evidence we have of life among slaves comes to us from reporters both black and white who were articulate enough to make records of slavery as they saw it. One of the
Most famous eyewitness records was that of Frances Anne "Fanny" Kemble, an English Shakespearean actress who met and married the wealthy Philadelphian, Pierce Butler, while on tour. Butler's wealth derived from a large family slave plantation in Georgia, and when Fanny Kemble first visited the plantation with her husband, she was shocked and dismayed by what she saw. She wrote voluminous letters to friends and kept a journal which was suppressed for some years and finally published in 1863.66 Once in print, Mrs. Butler's journal provided a vivid and sympathetic picture of slave life; her descriptions vary between horror at the treatment of slaves, especially slave women who were often required to work long hours even while pregnant or shortly after childbirth, and her frustration with the miserable deportment of the slaves she encountered. Her inability to accept her husband's role in the practices of slave-owners contributed to the reasons for their divorce.
Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington have also provided well-known accounts of their lives in slavery. Many slave narratives, often transcribed by literate blacks or sympathetic whites, have also been published.
As part of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, historians took a fresh look at African-American history and at the institution of slavery. They attempted to filter out the mythology and error in order to arrive at a semblance of truth. Attempts to right past wrongs, either of historiography or of actual historical situations, often caused the pendulum to swing past center. That is not to say that deliberate distortions were frequent, only that the most extreme conditions of slavery were often described in the greatest detail. The result of what some saw as excessive reinterpretation was that yet another round of defenses of the institution of slavery made their appearance.
Perhaps the best way to arrive at a satisfactory understanding of the institution of slavery is to acknowledge that it was for many slaves, in the words of Fanny Kemble, a "huge misery." Although slavery in some form had been part of human societies from the earliest times, by the mid-19th century the very idea of owning another human being as a piece of property had lost legitimacy. Even a society as backward as that of Russia had ended chattel slavery by 1861. And while it is undoubtedly true that many human beings existed in horrible economic straits, in conditions that were in certain ways just as cruel as those of slavery, one's permanent status in that condition was hardly institutionalized.
It is also true that within the slave culture of the American South, the full span of human relationships was undoubtedly present. There were slave owners and families who treated their slaves, or "servants," as they were euphemistically called, with at least a modicum of decency. Slave women often nursed white babies and lived in the master's house, where they enjoyed a comfortable existence. Although forced sexual relations between white slave owners and female slaves occurred with discomforting regularity, sometimes relations between blacks and whites were in fact loving relationships. Such relationships, however, were always condemned, and although the number of slave children with white fathers formed a significant portion of each generation, the treatment of those children of mixed heritage was uneven. Sometimes they were banished, sold off to rid the owner of evidence of his dalliance; sometimes those offspring were treated with kindness and affection, educated, and set free.
None of those factors, however, truly go to mitigate the reality of slavery. On too many plantations regular beatings were routinely administered to slaves who failed to toe the line. The sexual abuse of slave women occurred not only by the forced intimacy of white men, but also by the forced marriages with slave men. Slave women were often required to accept husbands not of their own choosing for breeding purposes. Although the brutal treatment of slaves occasionally reached inhuman levels, barely any evidence exists whatsoever that those who beat slaves unmercifully, even to the point of crippling or to death, were ever punished for their crimes.
It is distressing to note that even in the early 21st century there are those who would make the case that in its time slavery wasn't all that bad. And while it is true that people of African descent in America were not the only ones to suffer under the yoke of slavery, it must be said that in a nation founded on the principle that all men are created equal, and on Christian principles, the notion that slavery was a positive good is unsustainable.
It is also important to note that defenses of slavery, just as criticisms of slavery, were often determined by external factors that had little to do with the institution itself. It cannot be claimed, for example, that anything existed inherently in the Southern character that made slavery acceptable to people of the South. Had the economics of slavery, which drove plantation life in the slave states, existed in the northern parts of the country, one must acknowledge that slavery could have taken root there just as firmly. And as abolitionists often pointed out, Northern economic interests were perfectly willing to profit from the institution in various ways, just as Northern political interests were content to live under a government that tolerated slavery and protected it in its founding document.
No one put this dilemma better than Thomas Jefferson when he said, "We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go."
Economic historian Robert Fogel has written extensively about the institution of slavery, including the economics of slavery. In Without Consent or Contract,67 Fogel details in an "afterword" what he describes as the moral problem of slavery. Acknowledging that attempts to understand slavery has created "agonizing dilemmas and paradoxes," Fogel recounts that when he first became interested in the history of slavery, he and a colleague produced a work on the economics of slavery that was attacked on the grounds that it presented slavery in too sympathetic a light. In response to his critics he wrote what he calls a modern indictment of slavery.
In addressing the moral issue of slavery, Fogel believes an indictment should turn on four counts. The first count is that "slavery permitted one group of people to exercise unrestrained personal domination over another group of people." This charge calls to mind the often quoted dictum of British historian Lord Acton that "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." In a country founded on the principle that all men are created equal, and with religious overtones suggesting that all people are equal in the eyes of God, such domination had to be seen as a terrible offense on all grounds.
The second count of Fogel's indictment of slavery is the denial of economic opportunity. When Jefferson wrote that one inalienable right was the pursuit of happiness, what he meant was the right to make a decent living by any legal and ethical means. Economic rights of individuals imply that every human being should have the right to make his or her own best deal based on the talents with which he or she is born and the industry with which that person hones those talents. Many slaves constrained to working in the agricultural sector might well have prospered in other environments. In any case, the opportunity for economic advancement for slaves was virtually nonexistent, even on plantations or under conditions where slaves were allowed to earn modest sums to be used for their own purposes.
Denial of citizenship for those bound in slavery is the third count of the indictment. Fogel is referring here to more than just the right to vote and other assumed privileges of citizens. What he really means is that the slave was denied his day in court, that he or she had no legal recourse for the redress of grievances arising from offenses against his or her person. Even those who were denied the right to vote in other societies at that time still had the right to organize, to form organizations and to publicly plead for reform. Citizenship implies all of the rights incorporated in the first ten amendments to our Constitution, and slaves were denied all of those. As the court ruled in the Dred Scott decision of 1857, slaves and their dependents possessed no rights which white people were bound to respect.
The last count of Fogel's indictment is the denial of cultural self identification. Although slaves were able to retain some of the customs brought by their ancestors from Africa, they dared not openly exhibit full expression of their heritage. Slaves could not create a culture of their own; family life for slaves was often fractured by the sale of family members, especially children, and marriages between slaves were generally permitted only with the indulgence of the slave owner. As mentioned above, slave marriages were often forced upon slaves for the purpose of producing slave children, which would accrue to the economic benefit of the master.
In the 21st century, it should be unnecessary to argue that slavery was wrong, even though there are people of apparent goodwill who believe that in its time slavery was certainly an acceptable condition. Certainly it is true that every human being on this planet probably has both slaves and slave owners somewhere in his or her ancestry. As historian John Hope Franklin has said, slavery was old when Moses was young.
World History
