University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER VIII
THE NEGRO'S LIFE IN SLAVERY

SOME years ago one of the frequent subjects of
discussion among the white people and the
coloured people was the question: Who was
responsible for slavery in America? Some people
said the English government was the guilty party,
because England would not let the colonies abolish
the slave-trade when they wanted to. Others
said the New England colonies were just as deep
in the mire as England or the Southern states,
because for many years a very large share of the
trade was carried on in New England ships.

As a matter of fact there were, as near as I have
been able to learn, three parties who were directly
responsible for the slavery of the Negro in the
United States. First of all there was the Negro
himself. It should not be forgotten that it was the
African who, for the most part, carried on the slave-raids
by means of which his fellow African was
captured and brought down to the coast for sale.
When, some months ago, the Liberian embassy
visited the United States, Vice-President Dossen
explained to me that one reason why Liberia had

made no more progress during the eighty-six years
of its existence was the fact that for many years
the little state had been engaged in a life-and-death
struggle with native slave-traders who had
been accustomed for centuries to ship their slaves
from Liberian ports and were unwilling to give up
the practice. It was only after the slave-trade had
entirely ceased, he said, that Liberia had begun
to exercise an influence upon the masses of the
native peoples within its jurisdiction.

The second party to slavery was the slave-trader
who, at first, as a rule, was an Englishman or a
Northern white man. During the Colonial period,
for instance, Newport, Rhode Island, was the
principal headquarters of the slave-trade in this
country. At one time Rhode Island had one hundred
and fifty vessels engaged in the traffic. Down
to 1860 Northern capital was very largely invested
in the slave-trade, and New York was the port from
which most of the American slave-smugglers fitted
out.

Finally there was the Southern white man who
owned and worked the bulk of the slaves, and was
responsible for what we now ordinarily understand
as the slave-system. It would be just as much a
mistake, however, to assume that the South was
ever solidly in favour of slavery as it is to assume
that the North was always solidly against it. Thousands
of persons in the Southern states were

opposed to slavery, and numbers of them, like James
G. Birney, of Alabama, took their slaves North in
order to free them, and afterward became leaders
in the anti-slavery struggle.

Like every other human thing, there is more
than one side to slavery and more than one way of
looking at it. For instance, as defined in the slave-laws
in what was known as the Slave Code, slavery
was pretty much the same at all times all over the
South. The regulations imposed upon master and
upon slave were, in several particulars, different
for the different states. On the whole, however,
as a legal institution, slavery was the same everywhere.

On the other hand, actual conditions were not
only different in every part of the country, but they
were likely to be different on every separate plantation.
Every plantation was, to a certain extent, a
little kingdom by itself, and life there was what the
people who were bound together in the plantation
community made it. The law and the custom of
the neighbourhood regulated, to a certain extent,
the treatment which the master gave his slave.
For instance, in the part of Virginia where I lived
both white people and coloured people looked with
contempt upon the man who had the reputation of
not giving his slaves enough to eat. If a slave
went to an adjoining plantation for something to
eat, the reputation of his master was damned in that

community. On the whole, however, each plantation
was a little independent state, and one master
was very little disposed to interfere with the affairs
of another.

The account that one gets of slavery from the
laws that were passed for the government of slaves
show that institution up on its worst side. No
harsher judgment was ever passed on slavery, so
far as I know, than that which will be found in the
decision of a justice of the Supreme Court of
North Carolina in summing up the law in a case
in which the relations of master and slave were
defined.

The case I refer to, which was tried in 1829, was
one in which the master, who was the defendant,
was indicted for beating his slave. The decision,
which acquitted him, affirmed the master's right
to inflict any kind of punishment upon his slave
short of death. The grounds upon which this
judgment was based were that in the whole history
of slavery there had been no such prosecution of a
master for punishing a slave, and, in the words of
the decision, "against this general opinion in the
community the court could not hold."

It was a mistake, the decision continued, to say
that the relations of the master and slave were
like that of a parent and child. The object of
the parent in training his son was to render him fit
to live the life of a free man, and, as a means to

that end, he gave him moral and intellectual instruction.
With the case of the slave it was different.
There could be no sense in addressing moral considerations
to a slave. Chief-Justice Ruffin, of
North Carolina, summed up his opinion upon this
point in these words:

In making this decision Justice Ruffin did not
attempt to justify the rule he had laid down on
moral grounds. "As a principle of right," he said,
"every person in his retirement must repudiate it.
But in the actual condition of things it must be
so; there is no remedy. This discipline belongs to
the state of slavery. It constitutes the curse of
slavery both to the bond and free portion of our
population."[1]

This decision brings out into plain view an idea that

was always somewhere at the bottom of slavery—
the idea, namely, that one man's evil is another
man's good. The history of slavery, if it proves anything,
proves that just the opposite is true, namely,
that evil breeds evil, just as disease breeds disease,
and that a wrong committed upon one portion of a
community will, in the long run, surely react upon
the other portion of that community.

There was a very great difference between the
life of the slave on the small plantations in the
uplands and upon the big plantations along the
coasts. To illustrate, the plantation upon which I
was born, in Franklin County, Va., had, as I remember,
only six slaves. My master and his sons all
worked together side by side with his slaves. In
this way we all grew up together, very much
like members of one big family. There was no
overseer, and we got to know our master and he
to know us. The big plantations along the
coasts were usually carried on under the direction
of an overseer. The master and his
family were away for a large part of the year.
Personal relation between them could hardly be
said to exist.

John C. Calhoun, South Carolina's greatest
statesman, was brought up on a plantation not very
much different from the one upon which I was
raised. One of his biographers relates how Patrick
Calhoun, John C. Calhoun's father, returning from

his legislative duties in Charleston, brought home
on horseback behind him a young African freshly
imported in some English or New England vessel.
The children in the neighbourhood and, no doubt,
some of the older people, had never before seen a
black man. He was the first one brought into that
part of the country. Patrick Calhoun gave him the
name of Adam. Some time later he got for him a
wife. One of the children of the black man, Adam,
was named Swaney. He grew up on the plantation
with John C. Calhoun, and was for many years
his playmate. Swaney lived to a great age, and in
after years used to be fond of talking about the early
years that he and John Calhoun had spent together.
They hunted and fished together, and worked
together in the fields.

"We worked in the field," Swaney is reported
to have said, "and many a time in the hot
brilin' sun me and Marse John has ploughed
together."

I have taken these facts from an account of Calhoun's
early life by Colonel W. Pinkney Stark, who
has given, besides, a very excellent account of the
institution of slavery as it existed in the early days
in that part of the country in which he lived. At that
time and in that part of the country the planter
worked his own plantation. The overseer did not
come in until later, and Colonel Stark believes that
"whatever was most harsh in the institution of

slavery was due to the rise of this middleman."
He says:

The faithful discharge of the duties of the proprietor of a
plantation in former times demanded administrative as well as
moral qualities of a high order. There was never a better
school for the education of statesmen than the administration
of a Southern plantation under the former régime. A well-governed
plantation was a well-ordered little independent
state. Surrounded with such environments, Calhoun grew
at this school.[2]

The conditions of the Negro slave were harder on
some of the big plantations in the Far South than
they were elsewhere. That region was peopled
by an enterprising class of persons, of whom many
came from Virginia, bringing their slaves with them.
The soil was rich, the planters were making money
fast, the country was rough and unsettled, and there
was undoubtedly a disposition to treat the slaves as
mere factors in the production of corn, cotton, and
sugar.[3]

And yet there were plantations in this region
where the relations between master and slave
seem to have been as happy as one could ask
or expect under the circumstances. On some
of the large estates in Alabama and Mississippi
which were far removed from the influence of the
city, and sometimes in the midst of a wilderness,
master and slaves frequently lived together under
conditions that were genuinely patriarchal. But
on such plantations there was, as a rule, no
overseer.

As an example of the large plantations on
which the relations between master and slave were
normal and happy I might mention those of the
former President of the Confederacy, Jefferson
Davis, and his brother, Joseph Davis, in Warren
County, Mississippi.

The history of the Davis family and of the way
in which their plantations, the "Hurricane" and
"Brierfield," came into existence is typical. The
ancestors of the President of the Confederacy came
originally from Wales. They settled first in Georgia,
emigrated thence to Kentucky, and finally settled
in the rich lands of Mississippi. In 1818 Joseph
Davis, who was at that time a lawyer in Vicksburg,
attracted by the rich bottom-lands along the
Mississippi, took his father's slaves and went
down the river, thirty-six miles below Vicksburg,
to the place which is now called "Davis's Bend."

There he began clearing the land and preparing
it for cultivation.

At that time there were no steamboats on the
Mississippi River, and the country was so wild
that people travelled through the lonely forests
mostly on horseback. In the course of a few years
Mr. Davis, with the aid of his slaves, succeeded in
building up a plantation of about five thousand
acres, and became, before his death, a very wealthy
man. One day he went down to Natchez and
purchased in the market there a young Negro who
afterward became known as Ben Montgomery.
This young man had been sold South from North
Carolina, and because, perhaps, he had heard, as
most of the slaves had, of the hard treatment that
was to be expected on the big, lonesome plantations,
had made up his mind to remain in the city. The
first thing he did, therefore, when Mr. Davis brought
him home, was to run away. Mr. Davis succeeded
in getting hold of him again, brought him back to
the plantation, and then, as Isaiah, Benjamin Montgomery's
son, has told me, Mr. Davis "came to an
understanding" with his young slave.

Just what that understanding was no one seems
now to know exactly, but in any case, as a result
of it, Benjamin Montgomery received a pretty fair
education, sufficient, at any rate, to enable him in
after years, when he came to have entire charge,
as he soon did, of Mr. Davis's plantation, to survey

the line of the levee which was erected to protect
the plantation from the waters of the Mississippi,
to draw out plans, and to compute the size of
buildings, a number of which were erected at different
times under his direction.

Mrs. Jefferson Davis, in her memoir of her husband,
referring to Benjamin Montgomery and to
the manner in which Joseph Davis conducted his
plantation, says:

Some years after the settlement on the bottom-lands
at Davis's Bend had been made, Mr. Jefferson
Davis joined his brother and lived for several

years upon an adjoining plantation. The two
brothers had much the same ideas about the management
of their slaves. Both of them took personal
supervision of their estates, and Jefferson Davis,
like his brother, had a coloured man to whom he
refers as his "friend and servant, James Pemberton,"
who, until he died, seems to have had
practically the whole charge of the Brierfield plantation
in the same way that Benjamin Montgomery
had charge of the Hurricane. After the war both
of these plantations were sold for the sum of $300,000
to Benjamin Montgomery and his sons, who conducted
them for a number of years until, as a result
of floods and the low price of cotton, they were compelled
to give them up.

Thornton Montgomery afterward moved to North
Dakota, where for a number of years he owned and
conducted a large wheat farm of 640 acres near
Fargo. His brother Isaiah afterward founded the
Negro town of Mound Bayou, Miss., of which I
shall have more to say hereafter.

As illustrating the kindly relations and good will
which continued to exist between the ex-President
of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, and his former
slaves, both during the years that they lived together
on the plantation and afterward, Mrs. Davis has
printed several letters written to her by them after
Mr. Davis's death. The following letter was written
by Thornton Montgomery, who is at present associated

with his brother, Isaiah, in business at
Mound Bayou.

From all that I have been able to learn, the early
slaves, and by these I mean the first generation
which were brought to America fresh from Africa,
seem to have remained more or less alien in customs
and sympathy to their white masters. This
was more particularly the case on the large plantations
along the Carolina coast, where the slaves
came very little in contact with their masters, and
remained to a very large degree and for a considerable
time merely an African colony on American soil.

But the later generations, those who knew Africa
only by tradition, were different. Each succeeding

generation of the Creole Negroes—to use the
expression in its original meaning—managed to
pick up more and more, as it had the opportunity,
the language, the ideas, the habits, the crafts, and
the religious conceptions of the white man, until the
life of the black man was wholly absorbed into that
of the plantation upon which he lived.

The Negro in exile from his native land neither
pined away nor grew bitter. On the contrary, as soon
as he was able to adjust himself to the conditions
of his new life, his naturally cheerful and affectionate
disposition began to assert itself. Gradually the
natural human sympathies of the African began to
take root in the soil of the New World and, growing
up spontaneously, twine about the life of the white
man by whose side the black man now found
himself. The slave soon learned to love the
children of his master, and they loved him in
return. The quaint humour of the Negro helped
to turn many a hard corner. It helped to excuse
his mistakes and, by turning a reproof into a jest,
to soften the resentment of his master for his faults.

Quaint and homely tales that were told around
the fireside made the Negro cabin a place of romantic
interest to the master's children. The simple,
natural joy of the Negro in little things converted
every change in the dull routine of his life into an
event. Hog-killing time was an annual festival,
and the corn shucking was a joyous event which

the whites and blacks, in their respective ways,
took part in and enjoyed. These corn-shucking bees,
or whatever they may be called, took place during
the last of November or the first half of December.
They were a sort of a prelude to the festivities of
the Christmas season. Usually they were held
upon one of the larger and wealthier plantations.

After all the corn had been gathered, thousands
of bushels, sometimes, it would be piled up in the
shape of a mound, often to the height of fifty or
sixty feet. Invitations would be sent around by the
master himself to the neighbouring planters, inviting
their slaves on a certain night to attend.
In response to these invitations as many as one
or two hundred men, women, and children would
come together.

When all were assembled around the pile of corn,
some one individual, who had already gained a
reputation as a leader in singing, would climb on
top of the mound and begin at once, in clear, loud
tones, a solo—a song of the corn-shucking season
—a kind of singing which I am sorry to say has
very largely passed from memory and practice.
After leading off in this way, in clear, distinct tones,
the chorus at the base of the mound would join in,
some hundred voices strong. The words, which
were largely improvised, were very simple and
suited to the occasion, and more often than not they
had the flavour of the camp-meeting rather than

any more secular proceeding. Such singing I have
never heard on any other occasion. There was
something wild and weird about that music, such as
I suspect will never again be heard in America.

One of these songs, as I remember, ran about
as follows:

Little by little the slave songs, the quaint stories,
sayings, and anecdotes of the slave's life began to
give their quality to the life of the plantation. Half

the homely charm of Southern life was made by the
presence of a Negro. The homes that had no
Negro servants were dreary by contrast, and that
was not due to the fact that, ordinarily, the man who
had slaves was rich and the man who had no slaves
was poor.

The four great crops of the South—tobacco, rice,
sugar, and cotton—were all raised by slave labour.
In the early days it was thought that no labour
except that of the Negro was suited to cultivate these
great staples of Southern industry, and that opinion
prevails pretty widely still. But it was not merely
his quality as a labourer that made the Negro
seem so necessary to the white man in the South;
it was also these other qualities to which I have
referred—his cheerfulness and sympathy, his
humour and his fidelity. No one can honestly say
that there was anything in the nature of the institution
of slavery that would develop these qualities
in a people who did not possess them. On the contrary,
what we know about slavery elsewhere leads
us to believe that the system would have developed
qualities quite different, so that I think I am
justified in saying that most of the things that
made slavery tolerable, both to the white man and
to the black man, were due to the native qualities
of the African.

Southern writers, looking back and seeking to
reproduce the genial warmth and gracious charm of

that old ante-bellum Southern life, have not failed to
do full justice to the part that the Negro played in it.
The late Joel Chandler Harris, for instance, has
given us in the character of "Uncle Remus" the
type of the Negro story-teller who delights and
instructs the young children of the "big house"
with his quaint animal stories that have been
handed down to the Negro by his African ancestors.
The "Br'er Rabbit" stories of Uncle Remus are
now a lasting element in the literature, not only
of the South, but of America, and they are
recognised as the peculiar contribution of the
American Negro slave to the folk-lore stories of
the world.

In my own state of Virginia, Mr. Thomas Nelson
Page has given us, in "Uncle Billy" and "Uncle
Sam," two typical characters worthy of study by
those who wish to understand the human side of
the Negro slave on the aristocratic plantations of
that state. In Mr. Page's story, "Meh Lady,"
Uncle Billy was guide, philosopher and friend to
his mistress and her daughter in the trying times of
war and in their days of poverty. He hid their
silver, refused to give information to the Union
soldiers, prayed the last prayer with his dying
mistress, comforted her lonely daughter, and at last
gave her away in marriage. At the close of the
wedding, the old man sits in front of his cabin door
and thinks again of the old days. The musings

of Uncle Billy Mr. Page tells in the following
quaint dialect:

In the story of "Marse Chan" Mr. Page lets
Uncle Sam, the slave bodyguard, tell in the following
language what happened to his young master
during the Civil War on the field of battle:

In the Palace of Fine Arts in St. Louis during the
Exposition of 1904, there was a picture which made
a deep impression on every Southern white man
and black man who saw it, who knew enough of the
old life to understand what it meant. Rev. A. B.
Curry, of Memphis, Tenn., referring to this picture
in a sermon in his home city on November 27,
1904, said:

The slaves in Virginia and the border states
were, as a rule, far superior, or at least they considered
themselves so, to the slaves of the lower
South. Even in freedom this feeling of superiority
remains. Furthermore, the mansion house-servants,
of whom Mr. Page writes, having had an
opportunity to share to a large extent the daily life
of their masters, were very proud of their superior
position and advantages, and had little contact with
the field-hands. It is perhaps not generally understood
that in slavery days lines were drawn among
the slaves just as they were among the white people.
The servants owned by a rich and aristocratic
family considered that the servants of "a poor white
man," one who was not able to own more than
half a dozen slaves, were not in the same social class
with themselves. And yet the life of these more
despised slaves had its vicissitudes, its obscure
heroisms, and its tragedies just like the rest of the
world. In fact, it was from the plantation hands,
as a rule, that the most precious records of slave-life
came—the plantation hymns. The field-hands
sung these songs and they expressed their lives.

I have frequently met and talked with old men
of my race who have grown up in slavery. It is
difficult for these old men to express all that they
feel. Occasionally, however, they will utter some
quaint humorous turn of expression in which there
is a serious thought underneath.

One old farmer, who owns a thousand acres of land
not far from Tuskegee, said: "We 's jes' so ign't out
heah, we don' see no diffarence 'twe'n freedom an'
slav'ry, 'cept den we's workin' fer someone else,
and now we's workin' fer oursel's."

Some time ago an old coloured man who has lived
for a number of years near the Tuskegee Institute,
in talking about his experience since freedom,
remarked that the greatest difference he had found
between slavery and freedom was that in the days
of slavery his master had to think for him, but since
he had been free he had to think and plan for
himself.

At another time out in Kansas I met an old
coloured woman who had left her home in Tennessee,
directly after the war, and settled with a large
number of other coloured people in what is called
"Tennessee Town", now a suburb of Topeka,
Kansas. In talking with her about her experiences
in freedom and in slavery, I asked her if she did not
sometimes feel as if she would like to go back
to the old days and live as she had lived on the
plantation.

"Sometimes," she replied, "I feel as I 'd like to
go back and see my old massa and missus"—
she hesitated a moment and then added, "but
they sold my baby down South."

Aside from the slave-songs very little has come
down to us from slavery days that shows how
slavery looked to the masses of the people.

There are a considerable number of slave narratives,
written by fugitive slaves with the assistance
of abolitionist friends, but as these were composed
for the most part under the excitement of the antislavery
agitation they show things, as a rule, somewhat
out of proportion. There is one of these
stories, however, that gives a picture of the changing
fortunes and vicissitudes of slave-life which
makes it especially interesting. I refer to the story
of Charity Bower, who was born in 1779 near
Edenton, North Carolina, and lived to a considerable
age after she obtained her freedom. She described
her master as very kind to his slaves. He used to
whip them, sometimes, with a hickory switch, she
said, but never let his overseer do so. Continuing,
she said:

Two or three days after he come to me, and says he: "Charity,
how should you like to be sold to Mr. Kinmore?" I told him I
would rather be sold to him than to anybody else, because my
husband belonged to him. Mr. Kinmore agreed to buy us, and
so I and my children went there to live.

Shortly after this her new master died and her new
mistress was not so kind to her as he had been.
Thereupon she set to work to buy the freedom of
her children.

"Sixteen children I've had, first and last," she
said, "and twelve I've nursed for my mistress.
From the time my first baby was born, I always set
my heart upon buying freedom for some of my children.
I thought it was more consequence to them
than to me, for I was old and used to being a slave."

In order to save up money enough for this purpose
she set up a little oyster board just outside her
cabin which adjoined the open road. When anyone
came along who wanted a few oysters and
crackers she would leave her washing and wait
upon them. In this way she saved up $200, but
for some reason or other she never succeeded in
getting her mistress's consent to buy one of the children.
It was not always easy for a master to
emancipate his slave in those days, even if he wanted
to do so. On the contrary, as she says, "One
after another—one after another—she sold 'em
from me."

It was to a "thin, peaked-looking man who used
to come and buy of me," she says, that she finally
owed her freedom. "Sometimes," she continued,
"he would say, 'Aunt Charity, you must fix me up a
nice little mess, for I am poorly to-day.' I always
made something good for him; and if he did n't
happen to have any change I always trusted him."

It was this man, a Negro "speculator," who,
according to her story, finally purchased her with
her five children and, giving her the youngest child,
set her free.

"Well," she ended, "after that I concluded I'd
come to the free states. Here I am takin' in
washing; my daughter is smart at her needle; and
we get a very comfortable living."

There was much in slavery besides its hardship

and its cruelties; much that was tender, human
and beautiful. The heroic efforts that many of
the slaves made to buy their own and their children's
freedom deserve to be honoured equally with the
devotion that they frequently showed in the service
of their masters. And after all, considering the
qualities which the Negro slave developed under
trying conditions, it does not seem to me there is any
real reason why any one who wishes him well
should despair of the future of the Negro, either in
this country or elsewhere.