Slave tag used to identify enslaved workers in Charleston South Carolina.
Most of us are familiar with photos of shackles and chains that symbolize the enslavement of Africans during the
trans-Atlantic slave trade and the bondage suffered by African Americans. Less discussed until recently is the economy of the
domestic slave trade in the U.S., which included the kidnapping of free people of color (
especially children), referred to as the "
reverse underground railroad," and the economics of hiring out, renting, and mortgaging enslaved people. The same way dog owners today must have tags on their pets, slavers in Charleston, South Carolina, paid fees for tags or "badges" their enslaved human property had to wear as they went about the work they were hired out for. The rent-a-slave industry was big business.
After the release of 12 Years a Slave in 2013, there was heightened public interest in the history of the kidnapping of blacks to be sold into bondage, but no one Hollywood film can ever convey the scope of that history, nor the horror and fear felt by free blacks about the chances of losing their freedom, or the anguish of black parents whose children were snatched off the streets to be sold into hell.
Follow below the fold for some of uncomfortable truths.
Slavery apologists and slavery denialists have been offering excuses and telling lies about black enslavement since the dawn of the abolition movement. Those lies continue into the present, and there are those who whine, "Why are you dredging all this up? It's ancient history," or those who claim, "Well, my ancestors didn't own any slaves and it was just the rich Southern plantocracy who benefited." Denial does not equal truth, and without a clear understanding of the unvarnished truths about the often-hidden history of enslavement, we will never be able to change the current-day unequal status of black Americans.
Lithograph by Theodor Kaufmann, Effects of the Fugitive-Slave-Law. 1850
Effects of the Fugitive Slave Law:
An impassioned condemnation of the Fugitive Slave Act passed by Congress in September 1850, which increased federal and free-state responsibility for the recovery of fugitive slaves. The law provided for the appointment of federal commissioners empowered to issue warrants for the arrest of alleged fugitive slaves and to enlist the aid of posses and even civilian bystanders in their apprehension. The print shows a group of four black men--possibly freedmen--ambushed by a posse of six armed whites in a cornfield. One of the white men fires on them, while two of his companions reload their muskets. Two of the blacks have evidently been hit; one has fallen to the ground while the second staggers, clutching the back of his bleeding head. The two others react with horror. Below the picture are two texts, one from Deuteronomy: "Thou shalt not deliver unto the master his servant which has escaped from his master unto thee. He shall dwell with thee. Even among you in that place which he shall choose in one of thy gates where it liketh him best. Thou shalt not oppress him." The second text is from the Declaration of Independence: "We hold that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
Most of us are not professional historians, nor do we attend the meetings of groups like the
Organization of American Historians (OAH), "the largest professional society dedicated to the teaching and study of American history." The papers read there, the panel discussions, the books that are generated by research, though hotly debated in their academic forums, rarely make it onto the radar of the general reading public.
While continuing my own political and personal research interests in American slavery and the slave trade, I ran across a brief interview with Professor Paul Finkelman, who had chaired a panel at the OAH meeting in Milwaukee in 2012.
Albany Law School professor Paul Finkelman attended the Organization of American Historians meeting in Milwaukee to discuss the slave trade and how many blacks were kidnapped from the north and sent south. He also discussed the wide-spread practice of renting slaves, and how this tied non-slave owners to the slave system
The panel,
New Perspectives on the Nineteenth-Century Slave Trade, consisted of the chair, Paul Finkelman of Albany Law School, and three panelists who presented the following papers:
Patty Cannon’s America: Kidnapping and the Black Market in Slaves by Richard Bell,University of Maryland, Temp Work: Reassessing the Social and Productive Geography of Antebellum Slave Hire, by Susan O’Donovan of the University of Memphis, and In a Very Degraded Situation: Child Trafficking in the Wake of Emancipation in Early National Pennsylvania, 1784– 1820 by Sharon Sundue of Drew University.
I had just featured Finkelman's work in my Sunday piece on Thomas Jefferson and Robert Carter III. I realized I hadn't discussed either topic here, and thought it would be of interest, not only as part of Black History Month, but for everyone who cares about American history.
As Finkelman points out in the video, kidnapping was illegal. Too often in the past and present, the laws don't apply when we are dealing with black folks.
From
Freedom at Risk: The Kidnapping of Free Blacks in America, 1780-1865 by Carol Wilson:
Kidnapping was perhaps the greatest fear of free blacks in pre-Civil War America. Though they may have descended from generations of free-born people or worked to purchase their freedom, free blacks were not able to enjoy the privileges and opportunities of white Americans. They lived with the constant threat of kidnapping and enslavement, against which they had little recourse.
Most kidnapped free blacks were forcibly abducted, but other methods, such as luring victims with job offers or falsely claiming free people as fugitive slaves, were used as well. Kidnapping of blacks was actually facilitated by numerous state laws, as well as the federal fugitive slave laws of 1793 and 1850. Greed motivated kidnappers, who were assured high profits on the sale of their victims. As the internal slave trade increased in the early nineteenth century, so did kidnapping.
If greed provided the motivation for the crime, racism helped it to continue unabated. Victims usually found it extremely difficult to regain their freedom through a legal system that reflected society's racist views, perpetuated a racial double standard, and considered all blacks slaves until proven otherwise. Fortunate was the victim who received assistance, sometimes from government officials, most often from abolitionists. Frequently, however, the black community was forced to protect its own and organized to do so, sometimes by working within the law, sometimes by meeting violence with violence.
Parents of black children today worry that their kids will be shot for no reason. Black parents in the past, if enslaved, worried about them being sold away, and if free, had to fear the "slave-snatchers."
From Kidnapping in Pennsylvania:
A kidnapping ring discovered to be operating in and near Philadelphia in the mid-1820s provided evidence of how similar rings functioned. With relatives and a mulatto man as accomplices, Joseph Johnson preyed on children between the ages of eight and fifteen, luring them onto a ship with promises of work, then transporting them south and selling them into slavery.
Children provided a low-risk target, even if their cases somehow attracted legal intervention. Dramatic changes in children, resulting from growth and physical abuse, made indisputable identification difficult even for relatives -- whose testimony would not have been allowed in any case -- much less for a white patron, who would have to bear the expense of traveling South to make the identification. In a two-year period, at least a hundred black children were abducted from Philadelphia alone.
Lest you think that the kidnapping ended when the Civil War was over, read Kidnapped African American Girl Returned to Missouri:
In 1868, a young African American girl was kidnapped from her home in St. Louis, Missouri and sold into slavery in Cuba. During her two years of enslavement, she was forced to work in a hotel in Havana under terrible work and living conditions. She was finally able to escape the captivity of her house and enlisted the help of some Americans to make it to the United States' Embassy in Havana. At the embassy, the girl was able to meet with the United States' Consul. After he investigated the girl's origins, the United States' Consul successfully contacted the Chief of Police in St. Louis. After the chief was able to track down the parents of the missing girl, the necessary papers were acquired and the girl was finally reunited with her parents after three years...
At the same time Lincoln freed African Americans in the South with the Emancipation Proclamation, Cuban slavery and the trade of slaves was still bustling. However, in September 1866, a Spanish royal decree proclaimed the end of the Cuban slave trade. While it effectively ended the slave trade to Cuba, this decree did not en slavery. Instead, the decree stated that there would be a census conducted at the start of 1867 to register every legal slave. Any slave that was discovered after 1867 that was not registered would be immediately set free. Because of the recent ban on the slave trade, the young African American girl and others like her had to be kidnapped and brought into Cuba illegally to avoid detection from authorities. Otherwise the Spanish could have arrested her owner and set her free. Slavery was finally abolished in Cuba in 1886.
One of the first major works to deal with slave rentals as an essential part of slavery was
Jonathan D. Martin's Divided Mastery: Slave Hiring in the American South:
Divided Mastery strikes another blow at the idea of slavery as a primarily paternalistic endeavor. Recent research on the slave trade has shown that owners viewed their slaves first and foremost as commodities. If the buying and selling of slaves strayed from paternalism, hiring was perhaps an even more capitalistic endeavor. Paternalism necessitated a reciprocal relationship between owners and slaves, where slaves provided labor and owners provided care and protection. As the southern legal system acknowledged, hirers lacked the sense of self-interest to protect slaves, viewing them merely as means to profit. Additionally, owners who rented their slaves clearly considered their slaves more as investments than as dependents. Martin contends that even the area where one might be most likely see this paternalistic relationship in action, the act of slaves running away from their hirers and appealing to their owners for protection, in reality emphasized the lack of paternalism in hiring. In running away, slaves acted in an independent rather than a dependent manner, and in appealing to their owners, slaves emphasized their market value rather any sense of a reciprocal relationship.
And then there's
Slaves for Hire: Renting Enslaved Laborers in Antebellum Virginia by John J. Zaborney:
In Slaves for Hire, John J. Zaborney overturns long-standing beliefs about slave labor in the antebellum South. Previously, scholars viewed slave hiring as an aberration--a modified form of slavery, involving primarily urban male slaves, that worked to the laborer's advantage and weakened slavery's institutional integrity. In the first in-depth examination of slave hiring in Virginia, Zaborney suggests that this endemic practice bolstered the institution of slavery in the decades leading up to the Civil War, all but assuring Virginia's secession from the Union to protect slavery.
Moving beyond previous analyses, Zaborney examines slave hiring in rural and agricultural settings, along with the renting of women, children, and elderly slaves. His research reveals that, like non-hired-out slaves, these other workers' experiences varied in accordance with sex, location, occupation, economic climate, and crop prices, as well as owners' and renters' convictions and financial circumstances. Hired slaves in Virginia faced a full range of oppression from nearly full autonomy to harsh exploitation.
Whites of all economic, occupational, gender, ethnic, and age groups, including slave owners and non-slave-owners, rented slaves regularly. Additionally, male owners and hirers often transported slaves to those who worked them, and acted as agents for white women who wished to hire out their slaves. Ultimately, widespread white mastery of hired slaves allowed owners with superfluous slaves to offer them for rent locally rather than selling them to the Lower South, establishing the practice as an integral feature of Virginia slavery.
Randolph B. Campbell
reviewed Zaborney's research in the
Journal of Southern History, comparing it to Martin's:
Zaborney's study, appearing less than a decade after Jonathan D. Martin's Divided Mastery: Slave Hiring in the American South (Cambridge, Mass., 2004), reflects the increasing recognition by historians that hiring remained a neglected subject for too long. The two books tell essentially the same story, of course, but disagree on at least two points of interpretation concerning the impact of hiring on whites and on blacks--and ultimately on slavery itself. First, Martin emphasizes how often slaveholders and hirers came into conflict over financial arrangements and the treatment of slave property, allowing Zaborney to argue that Martin "concludes that slave hiring undermined slavery" by causing disputes that "fractured the white racial solidarity upon which slavery rested" (p. 2). Zaborney, by contrast, focuses on how whites maintained racial unity in support of slavery. Second, Martin argues that moving from one master to another allowed slaves greater agency in shaping their lives and thus destabilized the system. Zaborney recognizes the possibility that hired slaves could manipulate owners and hirers to gain an advantage for themselves but discounts the likelihood of success for such behavior.
These points of disagreement are worth considering, but neither deals with any fundamental threat to slavery in Virginia.
No doubt slaveholders and hirers argued and even went to court over issues of payment and treatment, but such conflict did not mean that either questioned the holding of humans as property and treating them as such--and Martin does not carry his argument that far. No doubt some slaves gained a degree of agency by exploiting divisions between their masters, a practice that probably made lives of servitude a little more bearable at times, but such gains did not mean anything close to freedom. The key point, which Zaborney's study fully elaborates, is that the practice of hiring enslaved laborers maintained the economic and social strength of the institution in the antebellum South's largest slave state.
Slave rental wasn't only done by individuals. Funds from rentals and slave sales were also garnered by institutions.
Washington and Lee College rented out slaves, for example. Those mentioned below were received them as a gift in a bequest:
An advertising broadside from Aug. 9, 1826, announces a public sale of Robinson's personal property, including horses, cattle, corn and three stills. The notice also advertises the slaves: "There will be hired, at the same time and place, ALL THE NEGROES, belonging to said Estate, excepting so many as may be considered necessary to work Hart's Bottom, and the old and infirm. — They will be hired either for the remainder of the present year, or until the first of Januaay [sic] 1828, as may be considered best — Terms will be made known at the sale."
A second advertisement in December 1826 announces "Negroes For Hire" for the ensuing year. It offers "Twenty Likely Negroes belonging to WASHINGTON COLEGE [sic] : consisting of Men, Women, Boys and Girls, many of them very valuable."
1827
The Washington College trustees compile "A list of negroes belonging to the Estate of John Robinson," which contains 84 names. Beside each name is the person's age, approximate value, additional details and physical characteristics, an indication of whether or not the person has been hired out by the college, and the hiring amount. This list includes six people who are listed as deceased, one as previously sold, two as having been traded, one as "owned by Chas. Barrett" and one as having been "given to his wife's master."
Slave Badges and the Slave-Hire System in Charleston, South Carolina: 1783-1865 is the book referenced in this article from the Smithsonian,
Cast in Bondage: Copper neck tags evoke the experience of American slaves hired out as part-time laborers:
"Looking at a slave badge evokes an emotional reaction," says James O. Horton, Benjamin Banneker Professor of American Studies and History at George Washington University. "There is the realization that one person actually owned another."
Urban slavery just prior to the Civil War accounted for less than 5 percent of the slave population in the United States. "One reason a collectible like this is so compelling is that, given our dearth of knowledge about the badge system, there is room for speculation," says Michael Hodder, a numismatic consultant who researched the subject in 1993 when the New York coin-dealing firm Stacks offered 14 badges—the first large private collection ever sold. They commanded $60,000.
The badges, Hodder says, "evoke a personal history which is almost unfathomable: beatings, hardships, tears, pain, separation, loss, a terrible sense of abandonment." At the same time, he adds, "one can read into them a sense of hope and planning for the future—the slave working to earn as much money as possible, perhaps to purchase his freedom or the freedom of a family member."
Badge laws existed in several Southern cities, urban centers such as Mobile and New Orleans, Savannah and Norfolk; the practice of hiring out slaves was common in both the rural and urban South. But the only city known to have implemented a rigid and formal regulatory system is Charleston. Perhaps the statutes in other cities were never enforced; perhaps paper badges, inherently impermanent, were issued instead. All of today’s extant badges can be traced exclusively to Charleston. There, from the mid-18th century to the end of the Civil War, ordinances dealt with the matter of owners marketing the labor and skills of their slaves by arranging for them to work outside the home or plantation. Perhaps a quarter to a third of white Southern families were slaveholders. The rest of the population, according to Horton, likely contracted to purchase slave labor on a part-time basis. "This was especially true if you needed a skilled craftsman," says Horton. "The process proved quite profitable for the master. The slave might accrue some portion of the fee—he might get it all or he might get nothing."
In the past I've spent far too many hours in courthouses and county clerk offices leafing through dusty archives, trying to decipher old-fashioned handwriting and looking at microfilm, searching for clues about not only my extended family who were enslaved, but also trying to get a sense of the times they lived in. The lie that many of us were told—that the enslaved had no history, no records—is being demolished.
The modern miracle of digitizing is shining a light on the buried past, and family members, teachers, historians, and students are the beneficiaries of this new age. I've spent hours reading the court records compiled by the Race & Slavery Petitions Project:
History of the Project:
Established in 1991, the Race and Slavery Petitions Project was designed to locate, collect, organize, and publish all extant legislative petitions relevant to slavery, and a selected group of county court petitions from the fifteen former slaveholding states and the District of Columbia, during the period from the American Revolution through the Civil War. Between 1991 and 1995, the Project Director and editor Loren Schweninger traveled across the South to photocopy and microfilm petitions meeting that criterion. During the initial three years, he visited fourteen state archives and about one hundred and sixty county courthouses. In subsequent years, he added to the collection: 945 Orleans Parish petitions in 1998; 200 petitions from records of Louisiana Supreme Court (various parishes) in 1999; 53 Boone County, and 149 St. Louis, Missouri, petitions in 2000; 84 Shelby County, Tennessee, petitions in 1998 and 2000; and 71 Noxubee County, Mississippi, petitions in 2001. With the exception of 563 North Carolina county court petitions, selected from five discrete record sets by experienced research assistants, the director chose all of the documents.
If you want to further your education about slavery, take a look. Here are some examples:
Free people of color petitions
State: Delaware Year: 1816:
Location: Kent Location Type: County
Abstract: Seven "freemen" protest "An act respecting free Negroes and free Mullatoes" passed in 1811 that they "humbly conceive oppressive and Contrary to the spirit of The free Constitution and power of Government of This State." The Act permitted free people of color convicted of theft to be "disposed of by the sheriff of the County as a servant" for a term of two to seven years. The petitioners argue that this could easily result in free persons of color being sold "to a Southern Negro Trader or his agent for a theft by them committed to the amount of even one cent where the miserable culprits will be carried perhaps from five hundred to one thousand miles, separated from all their connections, and sold by the Trader no doubt for life." Once sold, the petitioners assert, it would be impossible for free blacks "to procure or obtain any evidence that will free them," rendering them slaves for life and their children subject to "the most Cruel Slavery for Many Generations." Citing this as cruel and unusual punishment and thus in contradiction to the state constitution, the petitioners ask that said law be repealed.
Abolition
State: Delaware Year: 1826:
Location: New Castle, Location Type: County
Abstract: The Wilmington Society of Friends, at their monthly meeting, urge the legislature to immediately abolish slavery. Arguing that slavery is evil, unjust, and oppressive, the petitioners put forth that "we believe it to be a truth, that in oppression, cruel suffering, and degradation, negro Slavery remains without a parallel in the known world."
Mortgaging slaves
State: Alabama Year: 1830:
Location: Jackson, Location Type: County
Abstract: The petitioners seek to settle a dispute about ownership of a slave named Melinda, mortgaged in 1807 or 1808 by Hugh Montgomery to John Hatfield for three hundred dollars, with the proviso that Montgomery could redeem or repurchase her at any time by repaying the mortgage with interest, plus three bushels of salt valued at $5 a bushel. In 1830, Hugh Montgomery assigned the mortgage on the slave to his son, Benjamin, who assigned a half-interest to Wiley Belcher. Benjamin and Wiley now claim "that they would have redeemed said negro long since, but for the fraudulent and evasive conduct of said defendant," charging that Hatfield moved "to the most obscure part of Jackson County aforesaid taking with him said negro woman and all her increase," which now number "six or eight children." The petitioners seek an injunction to prevent the defendant from leaving the area with the slaves, to name Hugh Montgomery as a defendant, to cancel the bill of sale, and to attach said slaves until the court renders a decision.
Insurance claims
State: Louisiana Year: 1852:
Location: Orleans, Location Type: Parish
Abstract: John Bloodgood of Mobile, Alabama, seeks to rescind his purchase of a female slave and to recover $750, plus interest, from J. M. Wilson of New Orleans. Bloodgood represents that, in 1851, he purchased two female slaves from Wilson, for the price of $650 each. Both slaves "were fully guaranteed against all vices & defects.” Bloodgood now contends that one of the slaves, named Ellen, was in fact “affected with an incurable malady” known as “consumpsion or some kindred disease.” He claims that Ellen was attended by an “eminent physician” and all “proper care and attention” was given to her. Nevertheless, she died on the 16th of October 1851. Bloodgood therefore prays to have the sale rescinded and the purchase price refunded, with interest at the rate of 5% per annum. He also seeks $100 to cover medical expenses and burial costs.
Kidnapping:
State: Virginia Year: 1784:
Location: Fairfax, Location Type: County
Abstract: Sarah Greene and her two children were promised their freedom by their master Rev. Charles Greene, who died before he could execute his promise; the law at the time did not permit emancipation by will. Before he died, he extracted a promise from his wife, also named Sarah Greene, that she would free the slaves. The widow married Dr. William Savage before freeing the slaves, however, and Savage carried her to Ireland and left her while he returned to Virginia. Sarah Greene and her children, now numbering four, were allowed to "enjoy their Liberty for many years" until a relative of Dr. Savage named Rice kidnapped two of her children, carried them to "Carolina," and is now attempting to "carry off your petitioner" and her other two children. The petitioner "humbly hopes that your honble house will pass an act to confirm to herself and Children that Freedom which it was the wish and intention of their Master that they should enjoy. and to which Doctor Savage had himself assented as part of his marriage Contract."
State: Kentucky Year: 1845:
Location: Jefferson, Location Type: County
Abstract: Eight-year-old Caroline, a girl of color, asserts, by her next friend William Gilless, that she was born a free by virtue of having a white mother. Her mother, following a divorce, gave birth to Caroline, "her father being a man of color." Caroline was later turned her over to Michael Stephens, her mother's half-brother. Stephens has since acted as an "unnatural and inhuman uncle," and he sold Caroline to J. W. Brawner and James Quarles. Despite their knowledge of her claim to freedom, they took her to Louisville and sold her to Stephen Chenoworth and William Kelly. Caroline is currently in the possession of John Price, who has hired her for a term of five years. Caroline fears that Kelly and Price may take her out of the state. She asks that the defendants "be restrained from removeing her from this Commonwealth" and that "on the final hearing a decree be rendered confirming and establishing her right to Freedom."
Buncombe County, North Carolina, is a stellar example of what can be done to draw back the veil of the past evidenced by this:
Preservation and Digitizing of Slave Deeds Earns National Award:
Deborah Miles, executive director of UNC Asheville’s Center for Diversity Education, and Drew Reisinger, Buncombe County Register of Deeds, were named co-recipients of a 2013 Award of Merit from the national Council of State Archivists (CoSA). Issuing the award at its annual meeting last month in New Orleans, CoSA honored Miles and Reisinger “for their collaborative work on the preservation and digitization of slave deeds in Buncombe County, thereby bringing local records to the center of a national conversation on slavery and freedom.”
In the nomination for this award, Sarah Koonts, North Carolina state archivist wrote: “By digitizing and making these local records available in a variety of resources, Reisinger and Miles are helping educate people nationally on the variety of resources found in these local offices.”
Miles began the project collecting and preserving Buncombe County slave records in 2000, working with a team of local high school students who pored over a variety of records found in microfiche. Now, these Buncombe County records are available digitally, and Miles sees opportunity for greater historical understanding in preserving and digitizing other public records of the past, including co-habitation records, manumission records, wills and more. “Making these documents available in every county, sometimes with the research work of high school and college students, can teach students to be the historians of the present and the future,” says Miles. “I hope that teachers in former slave holding states will see the value of students becoming diggers of history and not just passive recipients.”
Here is a link to what Buncombe County accomplished so far through
Slave Deeds. Buncombe County:
The Buncombe County Register of Deeds office has kept property records since the late 1700’s. In our records one can find a wealth of information about the history of our community. On this page, we have compiled a list of the documents that record the trade of people as slaves in Buncombe County. These people were considered “property” prior to end of the Civil War; therefore these transfers were recorded in the Register of Deeds office. The list below shows the book and page number where the deed is located in our record books as well as the seller (grantor) and buyer (grantee) of the “property.” For your convenience, you can view each original document by clicking on the book and page hyperlink.
The Register of Deeds Office presents these records in an effort to help remember our past so we will never again repeat it.
Anyone who clings to the paternalistic idea of the "benefits of slavery" for blacks, and who speaks of the "happy industrious slaves" on the ole plantation, has swallowed the history whitewash whole, and has washed it down with moonshine.
The documents, and artifacts speak for those who are no longer with us.
I hope we are listening.