Fugitivism

Escaping Slavery in the Lower Mississippi Valley, 1820-1860

S. Charles Bolton

• Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781610756693
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Winner, 2020 Booker Worthen Literary Prize During the antebellum years, over 750, 000 enslaved people were taken to the Lower Mississippi Valley, where two-thirds of them were sold in the slave markets of New Orleans, Natchez, and Memphis. Those who ended up in Louisiana found themselves in an environment of swamplands, sugar plantations, French-speaking creoles, and the exotic metropolis of New Orleans. Those sold to planters in the newly-opened Mississippi Delta cleared land and cultivated cotton for owners who had moved west to get rich as quickly as possible, driving this labor force to harsh extremes.

Like enslaved people all over the South, those in the Lower Mississippi Valley left home at night for clandestine parties or religious meetings, sometimes "laying out" nearby for a few days or weeks. Some of them fled to New Orleans and other southern cities where they could find refuge in the subculture of slaves and free blacks living there, and a few attempted to live permanently free in the swamps and forests of the surrounding area. Fugitives also tried to returnto eastern slave states to rejoin families from whom they had been separated. Some sought freedom on the northern side of the Ohio River; othersfled to Mexico for the same purpose.

Fugitivism provides a wealth of new information taken from advertisements, newspaper accounts, and court records. It explains how escapees made use of steamboat transportation, how urban runaways differed from their rural counterparts, how enslaved people were victimized by slave stealers, how conflicts between black fugitives and the white people who tried to capture them encouraged a culture of violence in the South, and how runaway slaves from the Lower Mississippi Valley influenced the abolitionist movement in the North.

Readers will discover that along with an end to oppression, freedom-seeking slaves wanted the same opportunities afforded to most Americans.

CHAPTER 1

The Honest Growler and Absentee Slaves

ON FEBRUARY 16, 1853, the New-York Daily Times, a newspaper less than four years old that would soon shorten its name to the New York Times, published a long report titled “The South” by “Yeoman,” who had recently traveled extensively in the region. It was the first in a series of fifty such articles that would appear over the next year and a half, averaging about 2,400 words each. The author was Frederick Law Olmsted, who would in a few years design and construct New York’s Central Park and later urban green spaces in other major American cities and earn a reputation as the father of American landscape architecture, but who was also an outstanding travel writer and is still a major source for anyone trying to understand the South on the eve of the Civil War. Olmsted had much to say about runaway slaves, in part because they were important to his own economic perspective on slavery but also because the southerners talked about them a lot. Offering the best summary was an elderly black man who lived along the Mississippi River between Woodville and Natchez, Mississippi. He explained to the journalist the purpose of a set of wooden stocks standing along a public road: They are “for slaves that ‘misbehave bad,’ he said, “and especially those that run away. Heaps of runaways o’ dis country, suh. Yes suh, heaps o’n em round here.”¹

Fred, as he called himself, was born in 1822 in Hartford, Connecticut, where his father was a well-to-do merchant, and one of his ancestors had been an original settler almost two hundred years before. Beyond grammar school, his formal education involved living with a series of ineffective clergyman tutors and a single semester at Yale but reading and a passion for firsthand experience made up for the lack of classroom time. One early source of learning was accompanying his parents on tours of New England and New York state in horse carriages on annual summer vacations, during which Fred developed a love of rural scenery and a deep interest in agriculture. In 1843, at the age of twenty-one, he joined the crew of a merchant ship bound for China, hoping for adventure and a firsthand view of the exotic culture of the Far East; unfortunately, however, he was almost constantly sick, unable to spend much time ashore, and under the control of a brutal captain whose crew nearly mutinied on the return trip home. Back in Connecticut, Olmsted decided on a career in farming, anxious to demonstrate the effectiveness of scientific agriculture, and in 1848 his father bought him a dilapidated farm on Staten Island in New York, which in less than a year he turned into a model of productivity and beauty, improving the land and the crops, renovating the nine-room house, and landscaping the grounds. The following year, he took a break from farming and embarked on a walking trip in the British Isles and Europe with his brother, John H. Olmsted, and their friend, Charles L. Brace, soon to become a well-known reformer noted for sending children from New York’s slums to live in rural homes. Olmsted took extensive notes that he later turned into Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England, a travel book that discussed the social structure and economy of the country and praised the beauty of its countryside and the charm of its rural communities.²

The Olmsted family carriage rides in the Northeast and his perambulations in England were important to Frederick’s development as a landscape architect, but they also created a standard by which he judged the South, which always came off badly. His brief career in the merchant marine was also a formative experience, something that became clear in an article he published in the American Whig Review in December 1851. He was responding to a news item in the Times about a sea captain who repeatedly whipped a young cook who claimed to be too sick to work, had the man’s lacerated back washed in saltwater, and deprived him of food and water until he died. The Times was outraged at the captain, at an admiralty court that let him off with a fine, and at the first mate of the vessel who claimed the sailor deserved the punishment. Olmsted was sympathetic to the victim, but he believed that such punishment was a necessary evil. Citing his own experience, he agreed that seamen were whipped mercilessly and even capriciously, but argued the punishments were necessary to provide low-class recruits with the skills and discipline needed at sea. In his opinion, young men who were accustomed to the savage world of urban slums lacked self-control and were immune to rational persuasion. He summed up the analysis in a phrase that would be echoed in his judgment on the punishment of slaves: “Trained like brutes, they must yet be driven like brutes.” He suggested that the situation might be improved by giving young sailors an apprentice-like status that would bind captains to be responsible for their welfare and creating schools where they could learn nautical skills before they went to sea.³

Olmsted’s interest in the South and his career as a traveling correspondent grew out of discussions with a circle of intellectually active and socially concerned friends about the sectionalism that seemed to be tearing the country apart. Many of his companions were ardent abolitionists, but while Fred was opposed to slavery, he thought it “an unfortunate circumstance for which the South was in no way to blame” and that ending the institution immediately would be impossible. Instead he supported the free-soil position that would prohibit its expansion into the territories. He was a strong opponent of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 that made it easier for southerners to catch escaped slaves in the North. In fact, he said he would not only “take in a fugitive slave” but even “shoot a man that was likely to get him.” It was apparently Charles Brace who suggested that Olmsted should get firsthand knowledge of the South and introduced him to Henry Raymond, editor of the New York Daily Times. Raymond was familiar with Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England, which had been published in New York and well received by the public, and the editor quickly agreed to hire Olmsted and commission him to tour the regions and report on what he found there.⁴

Raymond’s charge to Olmsted was a general one, but Fred had a clear idea of what he wanted to do. His would be a factual account “of observations on Southern Agriculture & general economy as affected by Slavery,” and include information on “the conditions of the slaves” as well as the “hopes & fears of sensible planters & gentlemen.” He also planned to turn his newspaper articles into a book. Characteristically, he accomplished what he set out to do. Upon his return from the South, he did additional research in libraries to supplement what he had learned there and added extensive comments reflecting his own views, including those on the worsening sectional crisis. As we shall see, this material was also influenced by his prejudice in favor of the northern society, particularly that of New England.⁵

Olmsted’s experience in the South began on December 10, 1852, when the newly commissioned journalist, now thirty years old, checked into Gadsby’s Hotel in Washington, DC, to spend the first night of what turned out to be two trips to the South, which together involved about thirteen months of travel through all the slave states except Arkansas, Florida, and Missouri. He spent a few days in the nation’s capital and visited a farm in Maryland before going on to Virginia where he visited Richmond, Petersburg, and Norfolk, traveling mostly by train and spending three weeks in the state. He crossed into North Carolina on January 7, 1854, and over the next five weeks visited Raleigh and Fayetteville, rode a steamboat down the Cape Fear River to Wilmington and continued by train south to Charleston, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia, and then west to Columbus, Georgia, and on to Montgomery, Alabama, from where a steamboat carried him down the Alabama River to Mobile, and another one along the Gulf Coast to New Orleans, where he arrived about February 18. He traveled by steamboat up the Red River as far as Natchitoches and back to New Orleans and from there up the Mississippi River to Memphis, stopping at Vicksburg along the way. After one night in Memphis, he returned home mostly by stagecoach across the northern piedmont portions of Mississippi and Alabama and the western backcountry of Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia. The details of most of that journey are unrecorded, but it took a little more than two weeks. The entire trip included about three and a half months in the South, a month of which was spent in the Lower Mississippi Valley, less than a week of it in New Orleans.⁶

Within seven months of his return home, the indefatigable Olmsted left again, this time with his brother John for an extended journey on horseback through Texas that was hoped would cure John’s worsening tuberculosis. They left New York on November 10, 1853, on the way to Baltimore and then Wheeling, Virginia (now West Virginia), from where they took steamboats down the Ohio River and the Mississippi River to New Orleans, stopping along the way at Lexington, Kentucky, and making a side trip to Nashville, Tennessee. From New Orleans, it was another boat trip up the Red River to Natchitoches, where they acquired horses, a mule, and other supplies for a five-month “saddle trip” across the eastern portion of Texas, visiting Austin on the way to the Mexican border at Eagle Pass and then riding back via Houston and the Louisiana cities of Lake Charles, Opelousas, and Lafayette. At the mouth of the Red River, John, whose health had not been improved by the dry Texas air as was hoped, took a boat trip down to New Orleans, while Fred continued on horseback up the eastern side of the Mississippi River through Bayou Sara and Natchez. Having spent another month or so coming and going in the Mississippi Valley, he rode out of Natchez to the northeast through Jackson, Mississippi, and Tuscaloosa, Alabama, along the Tennessee-South Carolina border, up through Richmond, Virginia, and reached home at the end of July, nine months after leaving it.⁷

Olmsted’s first trip to the South was the basis for fifty lengthy articles published in the Times in 1852 and 1853 in a series titled “The South” and signed Yeoman, a pen name that reflected both the author’s interest in agriculture and his commitment to the American political doctrine of republicanism. In 1856, he published A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, based on the articles that covered his travels from Virginia through Louisiana. The second trip yielded fifteen additional letters to the Times and a travelogue titled A Journey Through Texas; or, A Saddle Trip on the Southwestern Frontier, which was written mostly by John based on Fred’s notes and published in 1857. Fred’s two return trips furnished the material for a series of ten letters published in the New York Daily Tribune in 1857, and that same year he used them for a third volume that appeared in 1860 with the title A Journey in the Back Country. Eventually the collective 1,732 pages of this trilogy were condensed and edited under Olmsted’s direction by the journalist Edwin R. Goodloe into The Cotton Kingdom, originally published in two volumes in 1861, which has become a classic of southern history widely read and cited down to the present.⁸

In the early pages of A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, Olmsted described himself as an “honest growler” for whom a critical approach to any subject was part of his nature, but he also claimed to be free of any “partisan bias.”⁹ Southerners might be excused for thinking the growling sometimes became more like biting and reflected a northern viewpoint. For example, The Cotton Kingdom contained this summary of southern domesticity: “Nine times out of ten . . . I slept in a room with others, in a bed which stank, supplied with but one sheet, if with any; I washed with utensils common to the whole household; I found no garden, no flowers, no fruit, no tea, no cream, no sugar, no bread, . . . no curtains, no lifting windows (three times out of four absolutely no windows).” He was similarly critical of the service and the food in most of the hotels where he stayed, the failure of trains and steamboats to depart on time, the nearly impassable condition of many roads, and the lack of education of much of the white population. An objective analysis might have excused some of this because of the rural nature of the South and the recent settlement of its southwestern portion, but Olmsted did not take that into account. Nor did he think that economic deprivation was the problem. “Nowhere in Georgia were people as poor as they were on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, yet there is hardly a poor woman’s cow on the Cape that is not better housed and more comfortably provided for than a majority of the people of Georgia.”¹⁰

Olmsted was also critical of the southern master class. Most of them did not display much more generosity of spirit or live much better than ordinary farmers. Despite their alleged “broad, generous, lavish, bountiful and luxurious . . . open-handed hospitality of character,” he claimed they never failed to charge him for a night’s stay. Their homes were often made of hewed logs, floored with puncheon boards, and lacked glass in their windows; and they served him mostly bacon, greens, and “pone.” The very wealthy planters sometimes lived in stately mansions with attractive grounds and ran well-organized plantations, but Olmsted found them excessively materialistic and fundamentally undemocratic. Those in South Carolina were a “decayed and stultified people” with “an absurd state and sectional pride” and “a profound contempt of everything foreign except despotism.” A Yale graduate well known to Fred and his friends turned out to believe in democracy only because it allowed him and his social class the opportunity to dominate their society and receive the greatest benefit from the economy. Above all, however, Olmsted blamed them for not doing more to educate and uplift their enslaved workers. Despite that, his critique of slavery was less negative than one might have expected.¹¹

Olmsted came to believe southern slaves were reasonably well fed and housed and treated humanely. Whipping and similar forms of coercion and punishment, he felt were necessary to make slaves work in the cotton fields just as they were necessary to turn the English lower classes into effective sailors. Paraphrasing his comments on low-class sailors, he wrote that “slavery has come to us from a barbarous people, and naturally, barbarous means have to be employed in order to maintain it.” His descriptions of the enslaved at work and play sometimes displayed an ugly racism that might seem to justify their bondage. For example, in South Carolina he and a friend watched a group at work under the direction of an overseer who rode among them carrying a whip and “constantly directing and encouraging them.” When he turned his back, they slacked off, and overall, to Fred’s eyes they were “clumsy, awkward, Gross, elephantine in their movements; pouting, grinning, and leering at us; sly, sensual, and shameless, in all their expressions and demeanor.” He found the whole scene revolting, seemingly bothered as much by the inefficiency as anything else.¹²

Despite his racism, Olmsted could accept the enslavement of African Americans only on a temporary basis. He thought black people were potentially as intellectually and morally capable as everyone else, although they were lacking “in those elements of character that were required for social interaction with whites, which should forever prevent us from trusting [them] with social munities [privileges] with ourselves.” If social, and perhaps political equality as well, were beyond them, he thought freedom was not, and they should be prepared to receive it. Responding in part to what he saw in the South, Olmsted became increasingly committed to the idea that it was society’s responsibility to uplift its underprivileged and under civilized (as he would have put it) members whether they were sailors, slaves, or impoverished northern workers. Fred was not an abolitionist, but he had a strong commitment to other forms of social reform.¹³

Olmsted’s major criticism of southern slavery was that it was bad for the South. Again and again, he argued that slave labor cost more and produced less than free labor, whether black or white. What modern historians see as resistance to slavery, he thought of as inefficiency. Slaves hired out by their owners in Virginia, for example, earned for their owners about the amount that free laborers were paid, but they required constant supervision and still broke tools, damaged livestock, and feigned illness to get out of work. In addition, they ran away from their owners, who had to waste time, energy, and often money to get them back. They also had to be housed, clothed, and taken care of when they were too young or too old to work. Lacking any real incentive, enslaved workers produced poor-quality goods and delivered inefficient service, creating standards of quality for the South that would not be accepted in the North. He blamed white southerners for using their money to buy slaves rather than spend it on public education, improved transportation, and other public facilities that would benefit society. Slavery did not elevate the standard of living in the South, except perhaps for very wealthy planters; instead it kept the region in a crude, frontier-like condition.¹⁴

Olmsted’s first discussion of runaway slaves took place less than two weeks after leaving Washington. He was at a farm belonging to Nathaniel Crenshaw, a Quaker, who employed Irish workers rather than slaves, explaining that he did it both out of conscience and in the interest of good management. Crenshaw was opposed to slavery but said he was not an abolitionist; he would not help a slave to escape nor would he return a fugitive to his owner. He claimed to know two enslaved people who had escaped to the North and done very well for themselves. One of them was a man who had been a free black in Virginia but then re-enslaved when he could not prove his status. He ran away, started a business in a northern city, and fifteen years later was worth $10,000. The other was a woman who was also free but feared re-enslavement. She went to Philadelphia and nearly starved to death at first but eventually came to own four houses in the city.¹⁵

Crenshaw said he might have solved his labor problem by hiring slaves as many of his neighbors did, but the cost was about the same and the black workers sometimes became discontented and ran away. They hid in nearby swamps, stole corn and livestock from nearby farms, and occasionally slept in the cabins of the slaves who lived on them. Runaways able to remain free until the end of the lease period often returned to their owners, who had lost nothing when their rented property escaped from a lessee, and they were sometimes so happy that the slaves had not died or “gone to Canada” that they did not punish them and hired them out the following year. White men hunted the fugitives, but Crenshaw thought they were not very successful.¹⁶

Further south Olmsted learned about escapees who attempted to live on their own permanently. This was in the Great Dismal Swamp that runs along the coast o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. The Honest Growler and Absentee Slaves
• Chapter 2. Like Ants into a Pantry
• Chapter 3. I Had Rather a Negro Do Anything Else Than Runaway
• Chapter 4. De Boat Am in De River
• Chapter 5. The Urban Runaway
• Chapter 6. Stealing Slaves to Sell or Save
• Chapter 7. Each One Is Made a Policeman
• Chapter 8. Federal Fugitives, the Kidnapper Captain, and Gruesome Stories
• Postscript
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author