Transcription
Your country before the pilgrims landed, we were here. Your country came in your before the pilgrims landed. We were here.
At the close of the first revolution in this country with Great Britain, there were but 13 states in the union. Now there are 24. And the whites are dragging us around in chains and handcuffs to their new states and territories, believing we were made by our creator to be an inheritance to them and their children forever. The whites want slaves and want us for slaves. But some of them will curse the day they ever saw us.
God will cause them to rise up one against another, to be split and divided, and oppress each other with sword in hand.
David Walker
The master was fixing to tie them up and whip them. They said, "Master, you ain't going to lick me." They runs down to the river. the overseer. He sure thought he can catch them when they get to the river. But before he can get to them, they rise up in the air and fly away. They fly right back to Africa. I think that happened on Butler Island.
Shared Hall, a slave of Georgia.
In the Sea Islands of Georgia, the slave community at Butler Island and St. Simon's was almost as old as the nation. The labor of these enslaved men and women made the Butler family one of the richest in the United States. In 1830, Pierce Butler was waiting to inherit his share of the family fortune. He was a 20-year-old Philadelphia socialite and had never seen the family plantation that preserved his affluence. Butler traced his lineage to the founding of the republic. His grandfather, Major Pierce Butler, was a signer of the Constitution and wrote its fugitive slave clause. The younger Butler, had little interest in politics, but like other men of his class, he rested easy in the knowledge that the democracy his grandfather helped create was firmly in the grasp of slavery men.
You come to Washington, the seat of the government of the nation that sees itself as the freest nation on on the face of the earth. And in that capital, what you see is uh slave auctions, slave holding pins, groups of slaves being marched through the streets on their way to Virginia or farther south. So that slavery is very much in evidence in the nation's capital. And uh not a few foreign visitors make note of the fact that they come to the seat of American freedom and they are struck by the presence of American slavery.
Although 75% of southern whites did not own slaves, the new President Andrew Jackson was a slaveholder, as were four of the six presidents preceding him. Men loyal to slavery dominated the Supreme Court and the presidential cabinet. Within a few years, their influence in the House of Representatives would prevent petitions against slavery from even being read on the floor.
The relation which now exists between the two races has existed for two centuries. It has grown with our growth and strengthened with our strength. It has entered into and modified all our institutions, civil and political. We cannot permit it to be destroyed. Come, what will should it cost every drop of blood?
John C. Calhoun, Senator, South Carolina.
Money invested in slavery was by far the largest concentration of capital in the country. By 1830, 2 million African-Americans were enslaved in the United States, worth over a billion dollars to their owners. By comparison, annual federal revenues were less than 25 million. The vast majority of the world's cotton was being produced and exported in the south. They were sort of like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait with oil at certain points in this century. They had it all and everyone else wanted it. And this gave them a tremendous amount of economic power in the world. And of course, all this rested on slave labor. And the cotton was shipped by northern ships and it was financed by northern insurance companies. The cotton trade was the basis of ship building of shipping, maritime uh enterprise, banking, insurance as well as the early factories which will be developing in this period transforming the cotton into textiles. So there were many thousands or hundreds of thousands of northerners whose livelihoods depended directly on slavery. So what that says is that African-American slavery can march right along with the nation as it progresses and African-American enslavement is part of the progress of America of white America.
For America, progress meant westward expansion. President Andrew Jackson forced Cherokees, Chalkaws, and other tribes off their ancestral lands. 25 million acres were seized from the Indian nations to make room for more white settlers, more cotton, more slaves.
I was meditating upon some means of escape. I had my secret hopes, but I must fight my battle alone. The war for my life had begun, and I resolved not to be conquered. My master had power and law on his side. I had a determined will.
Harriet Jacobs.
One cannot argue that slaves were content. You might have 10 slaves one night when you go to bed. The next morning you can almost be bankrupt if the slaves if those 10 slaves have left. That could be as much as 20 or $30,000 uh worth of investment there and they just disappear. Any attempt to escape bondage was an act of rebellion. Runaways were hunted by local patrols and professional slave catchers. In Edon, North Carolina, Harriet Jacobs was 21 years old when she decided to run. She hid under floorboards, in the swamp, and finally in her grandmother's house. A small shed had been added to my grandmother's house years ago. Between the boards and the roof was a very small garrett. To this hole, I was conveyed. The air was stifling the darkness total. The garrett was only 9 ft long and 7 ft wide. The highest part was only three feet high. Rats and mice ran over my bed. For a window she made a small hole. Through it she watched almost every day the master who had beaten her and stalked her sexually since she was 15. And she saw her children whom she couldn't take with her but whom she dared not leave. Relatives brought her food in secret and cared for her son and daughter. I lived in that dismal hole, almost deprived of air and light with no space to move my limbs for nearly seven years. Yet I would have chosen this rather than my lot as a slave.
Who better to define freedom than a slave? A slave probably never loses sight of the idea of freedom or when he or she does is the probably the moment when they are doomed. Our sense of freedom was something uh spiritual. It was like a fire inside of us.
Free African-Americans were one of the greatest threats to slavery. 182,000 in the south, 137,000 living in the northern states. in churches, newspapers, anti-slavery meetings, and negro conventions. They openly denounced racial bondage and worked to overthrow it. Slavery in the South had an impact on the life of every black person in the country, no matter where that black person was. It was almost impossible that if you were a free black person, you wouldn't have a friend or a relative, mother, father, son, daughter in slavery. And so you had that very personal connection in Boston. David Walker had never been anyone's property. He made a good living as a used clothing merchant, but his father had been a slave. And in 1829, Walker launched his own private war on slaveholders.
America is more our country than it is the whites. The greatest riches in all America have arisen from our blood and tears, and they will drive us from our property and home. They must look sharp, or this very thing will bring swift destruction upon them.
David Walker.
Walker's appeal to the colored citizens of the world, violently condemned American slavery and racism, and called for slaves to rise up against their masters. Racial bondage prophesied Walker was an abomination which would call divine wrath down upon the country. Walker said no, black people are Americans and they deserve to be not only freed but treated as citizens of this country. He he utilized the rhetoric of the nation, the rhetoric of liberty, of equality, the Declaration of Independence, and threw it back in the face of white America, charging the nation with being hypocrites, with violating their own uh professed ideals. Walker smuggled his appeal into the South by sewing it into the coats of black sailors. Its fiery rhetoric announced a radical shift in the struggle to abolish slavery. Southern officials put a price on Walker's head. $1,000 dead, 10,000 if taken alive. Three states, Georgia, Louisiana, and North Carolina, as a direct result of Walker's appeal, passed legislation making it a crime to teach slaves, or in fact, blacks, free or slave, from being able to read and write. And uh the south will now begin after the early 30s to limit civil liberties in a major way. Uh limiting freedom of press, freedom of the speech as a result of the abolition movement. David Walker died under mysterious circumstances. Two years later, in 1831, when Nat Turner's slave revolt in Virginia left more than 55 whites dead, southern officials blamed it on publisher William Lloyd Garrison and his Boston newspaper, The Liberator. At age 26, Garrison was impoverished. He slept in his tiny press office and was ridiculed for hiring a black apprentice. His anti-slavery newspaper was in continual danger of going under. But Garrison's passion to destroy slavery soon made him notorious among slavery supporters. Like other abolitionist, he threatened an American way of life. Garrison was also one of the few white abolitionists who shouldered up to David Walker and actually he serialized parts of Walker's appeal in the Liberator in 1831 after Walker's death. Garrison believed that through moral persuasion, as it was called at the time, by an onslaught of persuasion that Southerners over time could be convinced of the sin of slaveolding.
Before God, such a glaring contradiction as exists between our creed and practice, the annal of 6,000 years cannot parallel. I am ashamed of my country. I am sick of our unmeaning declamation in praise of liberty and equality, of our hypocritical can about the unalienable rights of man. We aren't guilty. All guilty. horribly guilty.
William Lloyd Garrison.
Black activists gave Garrison money, sold subscriptions, and filled his newspaper with their own anti-slavery writings. Three out of four subscribers were black. The Liberator became the voice of the abolition crusade. Abolitionists, white and black, trained themselves to be professional agitators. They preached their anti-slavery message in open fields and churches, in cities and villages. But as their assault on slavery intensified, so did the backlash from northern whites. A mob dragged garrison through Boston streets at the end of a rope. In Alton, Illinois, rioters murdered white anti-slavery publisher Elijah Lovejoy and destroyed his printing press.
What the abolitionists didn't realize was how deeply embedded in the social, economic, and political structure slavery was. They didn't realize how powerful the slaveocracy was. and they didn't realize how much racism had embedded the fabric of American life. Most white Americans knew that slavery was wrong. The way they reconciled themselves to it was that to think that it could be abolished would bring worse uh consequences on the country. One is that it would disrupt the constitution. It would perhaps unleash civil war. that it would unleash a large mass of free black people who were regarded as not assimilable in the society uh that it would lead to calamities.
Dear beloved mother, Satan has come down in great wrath in the city of brotherly love, knowing his time is short.
William Lloyd Garrison in Philadelphia.
The new abolitionist meeting place, Pennsylvania Hall, had only been open 3 days when the National Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women gathered there. As women speakers took the podium, they could hear an angry mob outside.
Do you ask what has the North to do with slavery? The spirit of slavery is here and has been roused to wrath by our abolitionist speeches and conventions. For surely liberty would not foam and tear itself with rage. Cast out first the spirit of slavery from your own hearts.
Angelina Grimkey Weld.
They were bringing women to the platform and having women speak in public, which was a brand new affair and a threat to to the order as people understood it. And perhaps most notably, they brought black abolitionists onto platforms, speaking in public, telling their own stories in their own voices. All of this, now to many white northerners, was a threat to the social order as they understood it. The next day, the black and white women held their ground. But that night, as they emerged from the building, linked arm in arm, the mob stoned them. The mob now increased to several thousand. and got in the hall by dashing open the doors with their axes. They then set fire to this huge building and in the course of an hour it was a solid wall of flame.
For abolitionists, the message was clear. Demands for racial equality threatened not only the slave holding south, but the privileges of whiteness in the north. We think of the jonian era as the era of the common man. And in a sense, it was the era of the common man as long as the common man was white. And so here here we have a great distinction between whiteness uh giving citizenship or standing or almost personhood. And no matter how rich you are, if you're black, you are not a person or you are not a citizen. And in the 1830s, over and over again, places like Pennsylvania, uh new legislation inserts the word white, uh into the uh the regulation of voting. So this is the I would say the great watershed of where whiteness makes the big difference in becoming a citizen. The racial system the system of white preferment in employment and political access in citizenship came to embrace virtually all so-called white people in this country who did in fact have a stake in the advantages of racial supremacy. They had access to jobs from which even free Negroes were excluded. They had the right to vote. So definitely white people gained uh from the system of racial supremacy. Without that, white itself would have been a meaningless category. It would have been simply a physical description like tall.
In all social systems, there must be a class to do the manual duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization and refinement. Fortunately for the South, she found a race adapted to that purpose.
James Henry Hammond, Senator, South Carolina.
By 1838, Pierce Butler of Philadelphia and his brother John had inherited the Butler family plantations on the Altaha River in Georgia. Ownership included 730 human beings. Slaves who grew Sea Island cotton on St. Simons and rice on Butler Island. At age 28, Pierce Butler, a man with a taste for high living, was now one of the richest men in the country.
His new wife was Englishborn Fanny Kimble, an actress of international acclaim. Kimell believed in abolitionism and even tried to publish an anti-slavery tract. Butler stopped her, fearing it would bring the mob to their doorstep. Their mansion was only six blocks from the ruins of Pennsylvania Hall. There's some controversy over whether or not Fanny Kimble knew where her future husband's wealth came from. There certainly was no controversy over the fact that she knew he was very wealthy and that was very attractive to her. And many Philadelphia families were attached to the plantation south by marriage, by inheritance. In December 1838, Kimble made the 10-day journey to the Sea Islands with her husband and their two young daughters to see the source of their wealth. She hoped to persuade Pierce to gradually emancipate his slaves as some slaveholders had. But she was entering into a world for which nothing in her life had prepared her.
We now approached the low rei banks of Butler Island. The warf began to be crowded with negroes shouting, laughing, and clapping their hands, a usual expression of savages and children to express their ecstasy at our arrival. They seized our clothes and our hands and almost rung them off. I believe I was almost frightened, and it was not until we were safely housed and the door shut that we indulged in a fit of laughing, quite as full on my part of nervousness as of amusement.
Although Kimble brought with her all the racial anxieties and prejudices of her time, she was drawn to the people in this place she called Negro land. She kept a very careful journal while she was there. uh she got acquainted especially with slave women who gradually came to trust her because she was different from any white person that they had ever seen before. The Butler rice plantation was the largest in Georgia, one of the biggest in the United States. Here on her husband's estate, Kimell expected to find the people well cared for.
Well, one evening, nine women came in and she thought, well, she had been getting these stories about how many miscarriages they had had and how many children had died and so on. She she thought, well, this evening I'll ask them all. I'll ask every single one of them.
Nanny has had three children. Two of them are dead. She came to implore that the rule of sending them into the fields 3 weeks after giving birth might be altered. Leah, Caesar's wife, has had six children. Three are dead. Sarah, Steven's wife, this woman's case and history were like deplorable. She had had four miscarriages, had brought seven children into the world, five of whom were dead, and was again with child. On Butler Island, chronic malaria sickened the mothers and created miscarriages and weak infants. More than half the enslaved children died before the age of six.
I stood in profound ignorance, sickening with the sight of suffering which I knew not how to alleviate. And I beg you to bear in mind that the negroes on Mr. Butler's estate are generally considered well off. 280,000 people were enslaved in Georgia in 1838. almost half the state's population. Effective slave management, the science of caring for and working negro slaves, was widely discussed in agricultural journals. In this essay, Butler overseer Roswell King Jr. offered readers expert advice on proper diet and medical treatment for Negroes. But Kembell discovered King and his father had raped numbers of slave women at Butler Island. Betty, Frank's wife, was taken from him by the overseer, the allefficient and all satisfactory Mr. King, and she had a son by him. I do not know how long Mr. King's occupation of Frank's wife continued. This outrage was notorious among the slaves.
Frank was headman Frank, the black driver, second only to the white overseer. A skilled planter, Frank supervised other black drivers and their work gangs. He assigned daily jobs according to the overseer's instructions. Serious infractions against the system, like stealing or running away, were punishable by a cool 100 lashes. On another plantation, Georgia slave Charles Ball saw punishment even more disturbing. And Charles Ball witnesses um a house servant as he finds out who's being brutally lashed. She's tied her legs and her arms are um tied to the ground. She's stripped to the waist. the owner um beats her brutally and she's bleeding and then he goes into the house and he brings back a candle and he lights the candle and he's dripping um the the wax on the wounds of this woman. But what he also found striking was that as she's being whipped, he looks at the house and he sees that the planner's daughters are looking out and watching this as well.
Oh, you suppose you were a child growing up on a plantation. The people who raise you, your surrogate mother, your mammy, is a black woman. This is a person that raises you from the time you are this high until adulthood. What is the impact on this child of having his surrogate mother become his property? What is the impact of having his best friend who is a black slave child come to him one day and say, "Do you know that your father has sold my father?" What is the impact of that on the white child? Oh, Lord. Oh Lord, I am getting perfectly savage over all these doings and really should consider my own throat and those of my children well cut. If some night the people were to take it into their heads to clear off scores in that fashion.
At Butler Island, the preacher Cooper London secretly asked Kimble for Bibles to teach the people to read, something they both knew was against the law. When Kimell asked him how he'd learned to read, he kept silent. Kimell continued to bring her husband slave petitions for more food, for rags, for a longer resting period after childbirth. The men forced to pull their own plows asked for mules. Finally, Pierce Butler had enough of petitions.
Today, I have had a most painful conversation with Mr. butler who has declined receiving any of the people's petitions through me. Whether he is wearied with these supplications or whether he has been annoyed at the number of horrible stories of oppression which cannot be done away with by his angry exclamations of why do you believe such trash? Don't you know the [ __ ] are all damned liars? I do not know.
This is no place for me since I was not born among slaves and cannot bear to live among them. I long to draw in a plentiful draft of fresh air, to stretch my cramped limbs, to feel the earth under my feet again. My relatives were on the lookout for a chance of escape, but none seemed tolerably safe.
Harriet Jacobs.
On a night in 1842, friends at last smuggled Harriet Jacobs north to Philadelphia by sea. Her son was safe with her free grandmother. Her daughter was already in New York. After 7 years in hiding, Harriet Jacobs was free.
The next morning, I was on deck as soon as the day dawned to see the sunrise for the first time on free soil. We watched the reening sky and saw the great orb come up out of the water. Soon the waves began to sparkle and everything caught the beautiful glow. We had escaped from slavery and we supposed ourselves to be safe once you're free. I mean that's not the end of your problem. You've got to work. You've got to have a place to live. You have to have very practical kinds of things. I mean these are people coming out of the south. So what do you do in terms of dealing with northern winters? Very practical kinds of things. Clothing. Were you going to stay in that city? Were you going to try to move farther north? Well, when blacks came to the north and lived in in black communities in Philadelphia or Boston or New York or out west, even in Cincinnati, they found themselves living in in largely all black enclaves. They found themselves living in communities where they created their own churches, where they struggled to create their own schools, where they occasionally, as in New York, would create orphanages, where they also tended they they tried to create a mutual relief associations to try to provide people with insurance policies, with the ability to buy land if they wanted to move out to rural areas.
In most northern cities, colored Americans were denied the right to vote, testify against whites, sign a binding contract, or attend white schools. But even this segregated freedom was jealously guarded. Runaways kept a lookout for slave catchers. They found jobs and raised money to purchase loved ones out of slavery. All ye that labor. By 1840, over a thousand anti-slavery societies had risen up in the free states, with black and white membership numbering 200,000. All that abolitionist women and men were sending thousands of petitions to Congress demanding an end to the slave trade in the capital. Abolitionist boycotted slave grown rice, sugar, and cotton. Anti-slavery slogans and emblems were seen on everything from sugar bowls to children's primmers.
But it was the powerful voices of fugitive slaves in the north that infused the movement with new urgency. While the slave narratives were in some ways an argument with America, they were an argument with the system of slavery. These were ways now that a former slave could not only publish his own story to release his own identity to sort of uh gain a kind of order over the chaos of his or her own life but it was a way now to directly challenge the people who had owned him uh with a free voice from a free place.
When I was a slave, I hated the white people. When I was 10 years old, we was all sold. I said, "Oh, God, my mother told me if I asked you to make my master and mistress good, you do it." They didn't get good. God, maybe you can't do it. Kill them. You see, I know what it is to be taken in the barn and tied up in the blood draw out of your bare back.
Sojourer Truth.
And it's very important for these people who for for white people who live in small towns isolated who may really have never seen certainly never seen a slave may may not have ever seen a black person to have a real living breathing person stand before them and say I was a slave this was my life this is what slavery is like. In 1845, five. The narrative of Frederick Douglas quickly became an international bestseller. Douglas, a fugitive from Maryland, risked recapture by becoming an outspoken leader in the abolitionist cause.
We hold slavery to be a system of lawless violence that it never was lawful and never can be made so.
Frederick Douglas.
It was not only slavery that Douglas and other abolitionists were calling into question, but the belief that the Constitution protected the right to own human beings. The Constitution of the United States, inaugurated to form a more perfect union and secure the blessings of liberty, could not well have been designed at the same time to maintain and perpetuate a system of rape and murder like slavery. Not one word can be found to authorize such a belief. The abolitionists, you might say, invented a new and different constitution, a different reading of the constitution, very much informed by the declaration of independence and its affirmation of human equality and posited as an alternative to the dominant vision of America as a white society which was so prominent in this period. So that the abolitionists, you might say, reinvigorated the rhetoric of the American Revolution, which stated that this was an asylum for liberty for all mankind. But that rhetoric had not been put into reality by the founding fathers. They had created a society of white entitlement.
In 1847 in Rochester, New York, Douglas founded the North Star, his own anti-slavery newspaper. In the anti-slavery bookstore above his offices worked another fugitive from slavery, Harriet Jacobs got a mind.
In January 1848, the discovery of gold in California's American River created what one newspaper called a revolution in the ordinary state of affairs. Many white southerners saw the new territory as a last link in a great slaveholding republic that would stretch to the Pacific shore. Within a year, 80,000 pioneers made the trek to the Gold Coast. Many masters brought their slaves.
By one estimate, African-Americans sent home from California over 34 of a million dollars to buy loved ones out of bondage. When Californians petitioned Congress to be a free state, southern leaders threatened to quit the Union and form their own country. The price for saving the Union would be the rights of black people. In 1850, in return for a free California, southern leaders in Congress demanded a tough new fugitive slave law. No black person, fugitive or freeborn, would be safe. Under this law, a person, white or black, could be deputized on the spot to help in the recovery of a fugitive slave. So that if you were uh on the street and a marshall was chasing a fugitive, that marshall could deputize you and you would have to participate in the recapture of that fugitive under penalty of uh imprisonment and fine. Special commissioners were appointed to try suspected runaways. Those accused were denied a trial by jury and the right to testify. Commissioners received $10 for every person returned to slavery, only $5 if the man or woman was acquitted. It now made the federal government and northern cit nor northern citizens complicit in the process of retrieving and retaining slaves uh back to their masters. It is the first time really in the lives of many white northerners that the slavery issue, the slavery problem kind of comes home to their neighborhoods. It comes home to their communities. It means now to harbor a fugitive slavery, even to be aware of a fugitive slave is to be committing a felony.
In New York, Harriet Jacobs was trying to make a new life when her former master's daughter, armed with the new law, came north to kidnap her. It was the beginning of a reign of terror to the colored population. Many families who had lived in the city for 20 years fled from it now. Many a wife discovered a secret she had never known before, that her husband was a fugitive. Many a husband discovered that his wife had fled from slavery years ago, and the children of his love were liable to be seized and carried into slavery. I seldom ventured into the streets. I went as much as possible through back streets and byways. All that winter, I lived in a state of anxiety. I found my way to Boston. I got employment. I worked hard, but I didn't tell anybody I was a slave. One night, I heard someone running behind me. Almost before I could speak, I was lifted off my feet by six or seven others, and it was of no use to resist.
Anthony Burns.
In 1854, the arrest of Anthony Burns triggered a showdown between Boston abolitionist and the federal government. abolitionists swore never to allow a fugitive slave to be taken. The South perhaps understandably said, "Look, this is our constitutional right. It's in the Constitution that we have a right to get our fugitive slaves back. How can illegal groups of northerners prevent this?" As news of Burn's arrest spread, hundreds of white citizens met at Boston's Fanual Hall. Black citizens gathered in the basement of Tmont Temple. The white meeting is going on debating about what they should be doing and so on. When the word comes that the blacks are attacking the courthouse and the white meeting empties out, pretty soon they're all around the courthouse trying to break in to get Anthony Burns out. There was but room for one to pass in. I glanced at my black ally. He did not even look at me, but sprang first. We found ourselves face to face with six or eight policemen who laid about them with their clubs driving us to the wall. I did not know until the next morning that one of the marshall's deputies, a man named Bachelder, had been killed.
TWW Higginson.
The mayor ordered two artillery companies into the streets. President Franklin Pierce sent in the US Marines. Boston abolitionists were already notorious for invading courouses and jails to free captured runaways. President Pierce was determined to show southern supporters he would enforce their fugitive slave law anywhere, even in the so-called great abolitionist headquarters of Boston. Over the next 3 days, the crowd of protesters grew to 7,000. They surrounded the courthouse and threatened the troops who guarded Burns. Black waiters refused to serve the soldiers. Douglas and others refused to apologize for Deputy Marshall Bachelder's death.
For a white man to defend his friend unto blood is praiseworthy, but for a black man to do precisely the same thing is a crime. We hold that when Bachelder undertook to play the blood hound, he forfeited his right to live.
Frederick Douglas.
You could think what you wanted about slavery hundreds of miles away, but when a individual comes to your community, a black individual fleeing marshalss who are going to try to grab him and send him back to slavery, it puts slavery on a human level. It may it made people have to choose. On June 2nd, Anthony Burns was convicted of being a fugitive slave. When the captain of the watch was ordered to bring Burns out of the courthouse to send him back, he resigned in protest. The streets are ringed or lined with people who have come in from the outlying areas into Boston, from Worcester and other distant places. Shopkeepers have draped their windows in black crepe and there's a coffin that hangs across the street with the message, "Here lies liberty."
I feel my investment in life here is worth many percent less since Massachusetts deliberately restored Anthony Burns to slavery. My thoughts are murder to the state. My thoughts involuntarily go to plotting against the state.
Henry David Thoreau.
50,000 citizens crowded the streets. Companies of US Marines, local militia, and artillery marched Anthony Burns to the wararf and onto a ship bound for Virginia. The showdown was over, but some southerners asked themselves if the recapture of one man was worth hundreds of troops. the enormous expense of $50,000 and the life of a deputy marshal. Two months later, on the 4th of July, William Lloyd Garrison publicly burned the fugitive slave law. Then, as the crowd said, "Amen," he burned the Constitution itself. "It was a covenant with death," he said, an agreement with hell.
By the 1850s, Americans had begun to measure progress in miles of track laid. Southern states were building railroads faster than Germany, France, or England. Cotton financed the railroads of the south. It purchased the African-Americans who became laborers and cargo for the iron road. When the cars began to start in the conductor cried out, the colored people cried out with one voice as though the heavens and earth were coming together. As the cars moved away, we heard the weeping and wailing from the slaves as far as human voice could be heard. And from that time to the present, I have neither seen nor heard from my two sisters nor any of those who left Clarks and depot on that memorable day.
Jacob Stroyer.
In 1854, America was poised to build a railroad across the continent west through the Kansas territory. Whether that railroad would pass through a Kansas free state or a Kansas slave state was a question Americans north and south were now ready to settle with blood. The Kansas Nebraska bill passed by Congress declared that whoever settled Kansas could choose slavery or freedom for the new state. To a lot of northerners, their conception of the future of the West was held together by this geographical guarantee that slavery could never exist above the 3630 parallel. The Kansas Nebraska Act now in 1854 erases that 34y old vow which had the sanction of the constitution. It now meant that the settlement of this vast territory of the west and the northwest was open to slavery. It was open to the possibility of three, four, five, six, eight new slave states. From northern states, thousands of pioneers set out to settle Kansas. The New England Immigrant Aid Company financed the settlement of entire villages. In Brooklyn, New York, abolitionist preacher Henry Ward Beecher raised funds to give rifles to the free soil settlers from Missouri, Georgia, and other southern states. White settlers came to Kansas armed to the teeth for the slavery cause.
If Kansas is not made a slave state, it requires no sage to tell that without some very extraordinary revolution, there will never be another slave state.
A sovereign squad of newspaper, Kansas, 1856.
But most northerners who came to the plains did not want to end slavery nationwide. They simply did not want to compete with it in Kansas. And they didn't want to work alongside black people, slave or free. Their movement was called free soil. Free soil meant free states for free white men. Is the future of America going to be America as white man's country or America as a country in which there are multiple races? One of the ways you can ensure that America is in the future white man's country is to make sure that that West was as white as possible, as free as possible from blacks, whether these blacks were slave or whether these blacks were free. Settlers who only came hoping to build farms discovered they were homesteading a battlefield. Two opposing territorial governments emerged on the plains, one pro-slavery, the other free soil. Each government outlawed the other, and both pushed to exclude free African-Americans.
Cousin Sydney, we heard that five men had been killed by free statemen. The men were butchered, ears cut off, and bodies thrown into the river. The murdered men pro-slavery had thrown out threats and insults. Yet the act was barbarous and inhuman whoever committed by. Since yesterday, I have learned that those who committed the murders were a party of browns. The war seems to have commenced in real earnest.
Edward Bridgeman.
In 1856, a raiding party led by John Brown and his sons avenged the burning of the free soil town of Lawrence with the blood of five pro-slavery men. At age 56, Brown was one of the few white men who didn't want an all-white Kansas. He was a fiery abolitionist who hated slavery, believing, as one acquaintance put it, that he was made by God to break the jawbone of slaveholders. As white men killed white men in bleeding Kansas, David Walker's prophecy of an American apocalypse seemed close at hand.
On the 4th of March 1857, the new president, James Buchanan, promised the nation that the US Supreme Court would at last settle the question of slavery in the United States, where it could go and where it could not. Dread Scott, a slave from Missouri, has sued for his freedom on the grounds that his master had once taken him to free northern soil. In his opinion for the court, Chief Justice Roger Bettoni resolved to decide African-American destiny once and for all.
Dread Scott was not a citizen of Missouri and not entitled as such to sue in its courts. We think they were not intended to be included under the word citizens in the Constitution and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges. They were considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings, subjugated by the dominant race and altogether unfit to associate with the white race. It is obvious they were not even in the minds of the framers of the constitution when they were conferring special rights upon the citizens.
Mr. Chief Justice Roger B. Tony for the United States Supreme Court 1857.
No black person could be a citizen of the United States, said Tory. This is a country, the family of America, as he called it, was white. And the South had a perfect right, he said, under the Constitution to expand slavery into all the territories of the United States. In other words, Tarn said that slavery existed wherever the owner wanted to take his slave. And then he made that very famous statement that that a black man has no rights that a white man has to respect.
1857, the year of the Dread Scott decision, was a time of financial panic brought on by overextended credit, over building of railroads, and over speculation in western lands. One of those who faced disaster was Pierce Butler. Butler had ended his marriage to Fanny Kimell in a scandalous public divorce in 1849. Kimble returned to the theater supporting herself by reading from Shakespeare on stage. Butler was still famous for his extravagance. He once lost $24,000 in a single hand of cards. By the time of the panic, he was already in debt. To protect the family's interest, trustees were given control of his estate. After the stock market collapsed in 1857, it was rumored Butler had gone through an inheritance worth over $700,000. To appease creditors, the trustees sold the Butler family mansion in Philadelphia. Then they traveled south to Georgia to assess slave property. Aotment A was Pierce Butler's share of over 900 slaves at Butler Island and St. Simons. Aotment A totaled 476 men, women, and children with a market value estimated at over 260,000. By February 1859, the Butler Island people had to know that something terrible was coming. Headman Frank was listed as superanuated, too old for the block. So was the preacher, Cooper London, who 20 years before had asked Fanny Kimble to send back Bibles and prayer books from Philadelphia. Pierce Butler did not want to put his people on the block. But in February, 429 men, women, and children, including a child named for the master, were loaded onto railway cars and steamboats and shipped to Tim Broke racetrack in Savannah. It would be the largest sale of human beings in the history of the United States.
And as soon as time get tough and he said he was going to lose his 500 acres of better because of taxes and hard time. First thing he did he was going to sell his supposedly family member which was you. Your skin was black. So you were going to be sold to make a difference. You were sold for as cheap as 200 bucks to as high as $2,000. But you were sold to save whatever he needed to save. He wasn't going to say sold sell his mother and father and his sister and brother. We were going to sell you and I.
Days after the Butler Island people arrived for inspection, a cold drizzle began to fall. The affair was regarded with unusual interest throughout the South. Nothing was heard of for days in bar rooms and public houses, but talk of the great sale, criticism of the affairs of Mr. Butler and speculation as to the probable prices the stock would bring.
Mortimer Neil Thompson.
Thompson came to Savannah from New York disguised as a slave speculator to record the event for the New York Tribune. None of these butler slaves had ever been sold before. On the faces of all was an expression of heavy grief. Some appeared to be resigned to the hard stroke of fortune. By the first day of the auction, the drizzle had become a hard rain. Desperate fathers and husbands tried to convince benevolent looking planters to bid for them and their families. You think love would be different than it is now? Their phrase was try to keep the family together at all costs. And they that's what they tried for. That's what they prayed for to keeping the family together. And they do anything to keep the family together. Practically anything to do it. The women never spoke to a white man unless spoken to and then made the conference as short as possible.
106. Marian Worster. Where he go? How many dollar? Good race hands here. Two good ones. How many dollar? What are you pointing? Two times the count now. You going to buy them both? I mean, through all the insults to which they were subjected, they conducted themselves with perfect selfrespect. 54 5 and a quarter. I'm thanking you. 5 and a2. The children were of all sizes, the youngest being 15 days old. $600 575 $600 $600. The buyers who were present to the number of 200 clustered around the platform. The wind howled through the open side. The rain came pouring in. $500 bet 500 500 $25$100. They were sold in families. But let us see. The man and wife might be sold to the pinewoods of North Carolina. Their brothers and sisters scattered through the cotton fields of Alabama and the rice swamps of Louisiana. Or the parents might be left on the old plantation. $,000 $100 at 11,100 once twice. Last and final call for $1,100. Sold $1,000 to a gentleman from Camden County.
Who can tell how closely intertwined are a band of 400 persons living isolated from all the world? Besides, do they not naturally become one great family? Each man a brother unto each. At Timber Racetrack, no legendary powers of flight could save the Butler Island people. For two solid days, remembered for generations as the weeping time, the heavens broke. As husband after wife, brother after sister, child after mother ascended the dreaded block to be called off individually or in family lots as stated in the catalog. The New York Herald reported that only after the last slave was sold did the rain stop.
Months after the great sale in Georgia, Dangerfield Newbie, a free man, learned that his own wife and children were soon to go under the auctioneers's hammer in Brentville, Virginia.
Dear husband, I want you to buy me as soon as possible. For if you do not get me, somebody else will. Dear husband, you know not the trouble I see. It is said, "Master is in want of money. If so, I know not what time he may sell me, and then all my bright hopes of the future are blasted. For there has been one bright hope to cheer me in all my troubles. For if I thought I should never see you, this earth would have no charms for me. Do all you can for me, which I have no doubt you will. Your affectionate wife, Harriet Newbie.
Dangerfield Newbie had no money. But that fall, he joined up with 21 other abolitionists in a conspiracy against the government of the United States. They would invade the federal arsenal at Harbor's Ferry, Virginia, and use the weapons to free slaves throughout the Virginia countryside. As Newbie saw it, this was his last chance to save his wife and six children. The conspiracy's leader was John Brown, a wanted man with a price on his head. After the fighting in Kansas, he circulated secretly among black and white abolitionist, collecting money, weapons, and volunteers to attack the federal arsenal. His extraordinary plan suited the mood of many black abolitionists. Some were already preparing themselves for what they called the irrepressible conflict. There is an increasing sensibility among abolitionists by the late 1850s, though they do not know how to plan it, that slavery is only going to be destroyed through some kind of violence. Besides Dangerfield Newbie, there was Osborne Anderson from Chadam, Canada. From Oberlin, Ohio came Lewis Liry. Larry's Irish grandfather and his free black great-grandfather had fought in the revolution. Larry recruited his nephew, college educated John A. Copelan Jr. Both had already risked their lives to rescue a fugitive from the hands of Kentucky slave catchers. And there was
Shields Green, himself a fugitive slave. Of the 16 white raiders, some were Quakers, some had fought alongside Brown in Kansas. Three were Brown's own sons, Owen, Oliver, and Watson. But missing from the roster was the man Brown wanted most at his side, Frederick Douglas. Brown had tried to recruit him and failed.
In order for John Brown's raid to have been successful, he would have had to overcome not only local military authority, not only state militia, but ultimately the US army. I mean, slavery was protected by the US government, not just by some local uh officials. And uh Douglas knew this. I told him, and these were my words, that he was going into a perfect steel trap. and that once in he would never get out alive.
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On Sunday, October 16, Captain Brown called his men down to worship. He read from the Bible and then offered up a fervent prayer to God to assist in the liberation of the bondsmen in that slave holding land. Every man there assembled seemed to respond from the death of his soul.
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At 8:00 on Sunday evening, Captain Brown said, "Men, get your arms. We will proceed to the ferry." Osborne Anderson, Harvest Fairy Raider. At first, they moved swiftly with military precision. The armory, the federal arsenal, and Hall's rifle works were captured without a shot. A squad recruited black men willing to fight from neighboring plantations. But Brown waited in the town too long and his men were discovered. Riders galloped to spread the word that the nightmare of Nat Turner's rebellion years ago had now descended on Harper's Ferry.
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As the sun rose, the panic spread like wildfire. Men, women, and children could be seen leaving their homes in every direction, impelled by fear. The judgment day could not have presented more terror in its awful and certain punishment. Osborne Anderson. By morning, there was full-scale war in the streets. Farmers and militia men poured into the town. Some of Brown's men were pinned down at the rifle works. Others barricaded themselves in the firehouse. Along the river, in the streets, the raiders were hunted and shot down, their bodies mutilated. Of the men shot on the rocks when the party were compelled to take to the river, some were slaves. They suffered death before they would desert their companions, and their bodies fell into the waves beneath. Osborne Anderson.
In 36 hours, it was finished. Troops led by Colonel Robert E. Lee and Lieutenant J. EB Stewart stormed the firehouse. Of the 22 raiders, 10 were dead. John Brown's sons, Oliver and Watson, were dead. Lewis Liry was dead. Osborne, Anderson, and four others escaped. Seven more were captured and would stand trial. among them John Copelan, Shields Green, and John Brown.
For slaveholders, the raid was proof of a northern conspiracy to invade the South and destroy its institutions. But more shocking were the bodies strewn along the river banks and in the streets of Harper's Ferry, proof that white men and black were willing to die to end slavery. In the name of the young girl sold from the warm clasp of a mother's arms. In the name of the slave mother, her heart rocked to and fro by the agony of her mournful separations. I thank you. You have rocked the bloody Bastile. And I hope that from your sad fate, great good may arise to the cause of freedom. Francis Ellen Watkins.
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On December 2nd, John Brown, 59 years old, sat on his coffin and rode to the gallows, convicted of murder, insurrection, and treason. Across the north, bells told in churches, public meetings, and in newspapers, he was proclaimed a Christian martyr. The charges of treason against John Copeland and Shields Green were dropped. According to the Dreadscott decision, they were not citizens and therefore not traitors, but on charges of murder and conspiring to incite insurrection, they were sentenced to death.
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My fate, so far as man can seal it, is sealed. But let not this fact occasion you any misery. For remember the cause in which I was engaged. Remember, it was a holy cause, one in which men in every way better than I am have suffered and died. Farewell. Goodbye. Serve your God and meet me in heaven. Your son and brother to eternity. John A. Copeland.
Dangerfield Newbie was one of the first men to die in the fighting at Harbor's Ferry. When his body was recovered, Harriet Newbie's love letters were found crumpled in his pocket. A year later, in 1860, South Carolina seceded from the Union. The next year, civil war began. The irrepressible conflict had come at last. Freedom to the slave should now be proclaimed from the capital and should be seen above the smoke and fire of every battlefield. Let the slaves and freecolored people be called into service and formed into a liberating army to march into the south and raise the banner of emancipation. Frederick Douglas.
Across the country, black men rushed to join the Union Army, but were turned away. For President Abraham Lincoln, this was a war to save the Union, not to end slavery. Lincoln feared offending the sensibilities of northern whites as well as the border slavery states who remained loyal to the Union. In 1862, Congress at last outlawed slavery in the nation's capital. A year later, faced with the need for more troops and pressure from abolitionists, Lincoln took the first steps toward emancipation. An immense assembly convened in Tmont Temple. We were waiting and listening as for a bolt from the sky. 8 9 10:00 came. Still no word. At last, a man exclaimed in tones that thrilled all hearts. It is coming. It is on the wires. The Emancipation Proclamation freed only slaves in states and parts of states still loyal to the Confederacy. A million slaves within the Union Territory were not freed, but Douglas and others were convinced this was the beginning of the end of slavery.
In 1863, the Union Army began accepting free African-Ameans and runaway slaves into its ranks. Over 180,000 would take up arms in the struggle. As Union soldiers fought their way south, they were met by thousands of escaping slaves. Sergeant George Hatton was stationed near Jamestown, Virginia, where the first African slaves had come ashore over 200 years before. There he saw how much the fortunes of freedom and slavery had turned. We captured several colored women that belonged to Mr. Clayton, who had given them a most unmerciful weapon. On the arrival of Mr. Clayton in camp, the commanding officer determined to let the women have their revenge. The white commanding officer first ordered Mr. Clayton tied up and fgged by a black soldier in company E, a man who had once been Clayton's property. After some 15 or 20 well-addressed strokes, the ladies, one after another, came up and gave him a like number to remind him they were no longer his, but under the protection of the star spangled banner, and guarded by their own patriotic, though once downtrodden race. Oh, that I had the tongue to express my feelings while standing on the banks of the James River on the soil of Virginia, the mother state of slavery. As a witness of such a sudden reverse, Sergeant George W. Haden, Company C, First Regiment, US Colored Troops.
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The nation's healing would be long in coming. Over 600,000 Americans died in the fight over slavery, as many deaths as in all of America's other wars combined. When the Civil War was over, slavery was dead.
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Three new amendments to the Constitution outlawed slavery and promised that no American would be denied the rights of citizenship on the basis of race. 4 million enslaved Americans were now free. Dear Mrs. Cheney, I would like to write to you a line from my old home. I am sitting under the old roof, 12 ft from the spot where I suffered all the crushing weight of slavery. Thank God there is no more need of hiding places. Harriet Jacobs.
Jacobs was one of thousands who came back to the counties where they had been slaves. Like their former masters, they too began the business of remaking their lives in a new land. The road to freedom they all started down now would be longer, more difficult, and more painful than they could imagine. But they began. I cannot tell you how I feel in this place. The change is so great I can hardly take it in. I was born here. I have hunted up all the old people, done what I could for them. Many of them I have known from childhood. Many will learn to act for themselves. I never saw such a state of excitement.
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My love to Miss Daisy. I sent her some jasmine blossoms. Tell her they bear the fragrance of freedom. Harriet Jacobs. Their struggle to be free, to be us, was only beginning.
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Here's the idea. Freedom is worth it all. Moses Mitchell, ex-slave.
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To learn more about Africans in America and to see the teachers guide for the series, visit the Africans in America website at www.pbs.org. To purchase the Africans in America home video, companion book or CD soundtrack, call 18002559424.
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Heat. Heat.
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