Slavery in the United States

Louis Filler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351306508
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Slavery in the United States clarifies the institution of slavery in its historical context. Filler avoids the all too prevalent literary attitude of either treating slavery as an unmitigated nightmare from the past, or regarding it as a way of life which warmly repaid slave and slaveholder. He does not reduce the issue to one of fact and figures, nor does he inject endless hypotheses and analogues. Rather, this finely etched volume encompasses the human implications of slavery and its practices. It emphasizes the distinguished and disreputable elements on both sides of the slavery relationship, and in every part of the United States.

Slavery offers peculiar challenges to the student of American life, past and present. It is unrealistic to avoid the human implications of slavery and its practice. It is equally unhelpful to assume glib and partial viewpoints with respect to so all-embracing a system as slavery became. The cause of progress, no less than social science, is not advanced by indifference to patent facts. The civil libertarian who romanticizes black people indiscriminately, and lumps Jefferson Davis with Simon Legree may win popularity with enthusiasts and ideologues. But they will soon find themselves quaint and outmoded.

The author reminds us that "the safest approach to slavery is to determine what the institution meant to the country at large; why it flourished as it did, and how it came to be opposed and overthrown." The work includes high quality often neglected readings that permit the reader to form his or her own views. It reveals the best writing on all aspects of the slavery issue, as well as analytic summations by contemporary historians and social researchers.

Part I
SLAVERY IN THEORY AND PRACTICE

CHAPTER 1

The New World and Slavery

The Problem of Slavery

Slavery came to be generally identified with Negroes. Public consciousness gradually dimmed respecting its impact upon Indians, to say nothing of white servant classes subject to the more onerous terms of indentureship. A Negro-white syndrome replaced recognition of the fact that explorers and settlers, leaders in English, French, and other provinces, and citizens of what became the United States of America, perceived life, its duties, and opportunities in particular ways.

Those ways changed under the pressure of events and the process of what has been termed “upward mobility.” In time, slavery as such was outlawed by Constitutional Amendment, and became part of a closed past. And yet not wholly closed. Survivers of older times were not stilled, and produced children of power and distinction. Wood-row Wilson, John F. Harlan, William C. Dodd, William Faulkner, Douglas Southall Freeman, Hodding Carter, among countless more of national repute—artists, editors, merchants, statesmen, and others—not so much defended slavery as they did the good name of the South. They were aided by those North and South who saw the Civil War not as a moral crisis, but as an adjustment in the equation of industry and agriculture.

Yet the problem of how to estimate slavery and its workings persisted and persists. Ulrich B. Phillips in his Life and Labor in the Old South (1929) recaptured in admirable prose a sense of how the institution had functioned as a living, breathing entity. Kenneth Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution (1956) retraced Phillips’s course, and more critically reviewed its workings for a less empathetic era. More recently, Eugene D. Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery (1965) pondered the workings of slavery as embodying dilemmas of a moral and economic nature.

But, aside from such analyses, how is one to treat the experiences of slavery? What approaches are appropriate to the figures, the events, the institutions of this ancient thread in human affairs? We would be poorer for a history of philosophy without Plato, a canon of poetry without Virgil, both products of slave civilizations. Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci, Gogol among a cloud of others were products of nations and families which lived and fulfilled themselves among slaves or serfs who were scarcely a step from slavery. If we withheld our regard from them or others who dreamed or directed governments and societies using the products of involuntary servitude, we would have to do without some, perhaps most of the greatest names of all time. At home, we would be deprived of such pillars of freedom and authority as Thomas Jefferson, George Mason (father of the Bill of Rights), and Andrew Jackson, to note three among many figures of symbolic stature. (See Reading No. 1.)

The easy solution is to wave them off as obsolete, and to demand freedom for all everywhere now. It is an attractive prospect, and has enchanted distinguished equalitarians throughout the ages. The problem is to define freedom, today as well as yesterday, and to determine what a living society will tolerate and accept. The best of libertarians have found it necessary or expedient to view the workings of slavery more closely. They have labored to perceive shades of differences between slaves and slaveholders, freemen and freedmen, northerners and southerners, in all the categories of work and privilege.

The Slavery Heritage

The nineteenth-century argument over the fundamental right and wrong of slavery centered over its validity as an institution in Biblical circumstances, more so than among the much admired ancient Greeks. Yet the most present-minded equali-tarian could not but be aware of slavery’s long, if undistinguished past. Traces of it survived in such varied concepts as servant and man-servant, chattel, hand-maiden, galley slave, and bondage. It suggested the fruits of victory and defeat among nations. Domestically, it referred more to a system of labor than to a moral imperative. During the critical years of the antislavery debate, northern partisans would try to expose differences between Bible slavery and that at home, to the latter’s disadvantage. Southern defenders would identify themselves with Greece and Rome, describing themselves as part of a “Mediterranean civilization.” Though slavery hewed a continuous path from remotest times, reiatively little of its history was retained in the American consciousness. It was a curious fact of the slavery debate that then-contemporary modes of enslavement in Egypt, China, Arabia, India, and South America received meager publicity. As a popular “Treasury of Useful Knowledge” noted, as late as 1847: “An arrangement so universal as servitude, and so conspicuous at all times, and under almost all circumstances, may be presumed to be founded in nature.”

Vague echoes of enslavement in Assyrian and other early dynasties were heard. Egyptian enslavement of Hebrews was recalled from several perspectives, as was slavery among the Hebrews. That the proud Roman Empire was based on slavery was well appreciated. So was the treatment suffered under it by early Christians. Less fully analyzed was the persistence of slavery under succeeding Christian emperors. The deterioration in Europe of slave practices and traditions, and their replacement by serfdom was also obscurely rumored, especially in connection with such landmarks as Magna Carta. In America, the residue of historical recollection favored freedom. The tale of the gladiator Spartacus, who led a slave revolt in 73 B.C. which shook Rome, never lost its ability to excite.

The Indian as Slave and Slaver

Colonial Americans of various nationalities fostered and indeed sponsored social discriminations up and down the scale of humanity, of which Negroes constituted only a minor part. One clear difference among peoples affecting the lot of slaves separated Catholic French and Spanish from what were mainly Protestant English pioneers and settlers. The Spanish swept through Central America and into the Caribbean and below. They sought the conversion of the Indians to Christianity, but they made broad efforts to enslave them as well. So harsh and unfruitful was the labor of Indians under their Spanish conquerors in the West Indian islands that the famous Friar Bartolomé de Las Casas, “Apostle to the Indies,” in pity urged the importation of Negro slaves from Africa to retard the extermination of the Indians. His plea brought thousands of Negroes to the Caribbean in 1518.

The Spanish left their marks farther north. They took “plunder trails” into what became the American Southwest, thrusting in as far as later Kansas. Their expeditions were accompanied by baptismal ceremonies, but also by enslavements which became traditional not only among Spanish and Mexicans, but among the Indians themselves.

As commerce and as social practice, slavery persisted throughout the period preceding the Civil War, and even beyond. As late as 1852, an act passed by the Territorial Legislature of Utah, “For the Relief of Indian Slaves and Prisoners,” provided a milestone in a long and tragic history. It recalled the tradition of Mexican slave trading and the “common practice among these Indians to gamble away their own children and women.” It noted the pitiful treatment which slaves were accorded who were taken in war or by theft, and offered legislation intended to raise their status in law and opportunity. But the document itself made it evident that family and tribal custom, as well as white-Indian differences, were likely to continue to affect Indian perspectives in the future as they had in the past.

The English were less concerned with conversion, though they were to produce notable friends of the Indians, including the saintly John Eliot of Massachusetts. In 1646 he initiated the education of Indians as part of his effort to Christianize them. For the most part his compatriots were content to best the Indians in trade, defeat them in battle, and drive them to despair. They also made efforts to enslave them, and to root Indian slavery into their economy and society, for both selfish or philanthropic purposes.

Thus Captain Israel Stoughton of Massachusetts, following an armed conflict with Indians, wrote Governor John Winthrop:

By this pinnace, you shall receive 48 or 50 women and children, unless there stay any here to be helpful, concerning which there is one, I formerly mentioned, that is the fairest and largest among them to whom I have given a coate to cloathe her. It is my desire to have her for a servant, if it may stand to your good liking, else not. There is a little squaw that steward Culacut desireth, to whom he hath given a coate. Lieut. Davenport also desireth one, to wit, a small one, that has three strokes upon her stomach. ... He desireth her, if it will stand upon your good liking. Sosomon, the Indian, desireth a young little squaw, which I know not.

In 1637, Roger Williams petitioned Winthrop in different vein:

It having againe pleased the Most High to put into your hands another miserable drove of Adams degenerate seede, & our brethren by nature, I am bold (if I may not offend in it) to request the keeping & bringing up of one of the children. I have fixed mine eye on this little one with the red about his neck, but I will not be peremptory in my choice, but will rest in your loving pleasure for him or any,&c.

Laws covering the workings of Indian enslavement were extremely detailed. They varied from colony to colony. They specified groups and individuals whose freedom was limited or protected, by virtue of a colony’s attitude toward either Indians or slavery. Thus the Province of New York separated free Indian inhabitants from those brought from the Spanish West Indies. Laws changed, as when in 1688, the English council in New York resolved “that all Indian slaves within this province subject to the King of Spain, that can give an account of their Christian faith and say the Lord’s Prayer, be forthwith set at liberty, and sent home by the first conveyance, and likewise them that shall hereafter come to the province.”

Generally, the Indian did not flourish as a slave to the English or other foreigners. His temperament, his habits of life, and what might today be called “expectations” do not appear to have fitted him for a servile place in the larger American economy. Indians as slaves to other Indians there were indeed, and also Negroes as slaves to Indians. However that might be, they responded differently to the English. Their status as original tenants of the land doubtless contributed to their frustration in the slave role. They died in battle or in bondage, submitted to the reservation life—the earliest American reservation being set up in 1786—or moved or were driven west. They assumed a subordinate role in American life, perhaps more so than did the Negroes, which has continued to the present.

Was slavery among Indians a defensible institution? Some abolitionists would later argue that the slavery they so vehemently opposed in the 1830-1860 period differed in kind from some forms of earlier enslavement, and also from slavery among contemporary Cherokees and Choctaws. They would insist that these systems of slavery constituted variations on tribal and family relations. They would contrast it to the slavery practiced by white southerners upon Negroes as “unmitigated,” that is, as offering no avenues of human progress and hope to the blacks. Other abolitionists denied this view as a fantasy, especially as it pertained to the Indians. (See Reading No. 2.)

Indentureship and slavery

Most formidable during its long tenure—vastly more formidable, it appeared, than Negro enslavement —was the practice of indentured servitude: not ordinarily recognized as a slavery system, but involving elements which placed it in comparable categories. The famous New England Confederation (1643-1684), precursor of the later Revolutionary alliance, was created in part for assault and defense against Indians, in part to facilitate the return of fugitive slaves.

There were numerous forms of labor practiced by indentured servants (generally known as kids). Those forms varied from rigid conditions of servitude to relatively “free” labor. They took in “re-demptioners,” who sold their services for a period of years in order to have their passage paid to America. They included also apprentices, such involuntary laborers as convicts and debtors, and others. All worked “from sun-up to sun-down,” their ease or opportunities to develop being subject to the peccadilloes of their masters. George Washington, in his youth, was taught by a convict servant whom his father bought for a schoolmaster. The constant need for labor in America tempted employers to wink at the pretentions of runaways from other colonies who claimed to be free. Indentured servitude as such gave way to the system of artisans and apprentices. But before it did, it had established norms of labor relations which ruled colonial times.

It was probably the success which attended indentured servitude, as well as the better perceived factors of rocky soil and Puritan tenets which discouraged Negro slavery in the North and made it easier to dislodge by practice and legislation. Even so, it is desirable to recall that Negro slavery in the original northern colonies persisted far beyond the American Revolution, thanks to the system of gradual emancipation which, for example, officially ended slavery in New York State in 1827, though proclaimed in 1799.*

Even so, remnants of the system of slavery proper undoubtedly persisted in the North. Thus, Sojourner Truth’s owner in upper New York illegally sold her child of five years of age, he being transported south to Alabama. She herself was assured of freedom a year before Emancipation, but her master repudiating his promise on specious grounds, she was ordered to serve a year beyond the legal date. Only escape and the generous help of strangers prevented her further exploitation.

What is important to note is that indentured servitude and associated legal agreements between master and worker were in fact servitude, and so universally understood. Runaway servants were sought in precise fashion as were runaway slaves.

One landmark in the decay of these institutions—at least, from hindsight—was the fleeing of Andrew Johnson in 1824 from the terms of his bound apprenticeship. A runaway from his master, a tailor in his native Raleigh, North Carolina, Johnson was advertised and sought, a reward of ten dollars being put upon him. This unlettered fugitive began life anew as a tailor in Greeneville, Tennessee. He became a sheriff, a mayor, a governor, a United States Senator, and a leader of the Homestead movement of 1846 and after, before attaining higher distinctions. But even before the saga of Andrew Johnson began, indentured servitude proper produced its prodigies: two signers of the Declaration of Independence, George Taylor of Pennsylvania and Matthew Thornton of New Hampshire, had been white servants.

White Slaves

Those who ponder the bitter lot of Negro slaves can sharpen perspective by reviewing that of the white slaves. They were preferred to free labor because of the high price the latter fetched in America. They accepted the harsh sweeping terms of in-dentureship because their prospects in the New World had been painted in inaccurately glowing terms, because they lacked money to come independently by ship, because they had been felons and ordered transported, or because they had been kidnapped and spirited on board ship for service in America.

Once here, their careers were at the mercy of circumstances. A kind master or a cruel one, an intelligent master or a stupid one, could make all the difference. But whether one or the other, their labors were long and arduous, and not to be distinguished in any particular from that of Negro slaves. Like them, on the lower levels of employment, they cleared the land and worked the crop. Because the terms of indentureship were limited to four to seven years, they could expect to be worked harder than servants who were owned for life.

They were talented servants and inept ones, but the majority of them, if not already so, were toughened and brutalized by their lot. A famous bit of verse by Ebenezer Cook, a tobacco agent, The Sot Weed Factor or a Voyage to Maryland (1708) sees them at their rude sports and reflects their thoughts and fancies. Thus, Cook sees some coarse woman servants, dirty and harsh, quarrelling and at play. One calls to another:

D—n you, . . . tho’ now so brave

I knew you late a Four-Years Slave;

What if for Planter’s W...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition: Slavery as Labor System and as Moral Challenge
• Preface
• Part I: Slavery in Theory and Practice
• Part II Readings