Cobbs-Hoffman Elizabeth, Blum Edward J., Gjerde Jon. Major Problems in American History, Volume I, 3 edition (ENG)

future. Wealth is more equally distributed than at the North, where a few mil-

lionaires own most of the property of the country. (These millionaires are men

of cold hearts and weak minds; they know how to make money, but not how to

use it, either for the benefit of themselves or of others.) High intellectual and

moral attainments, refinement of head and heart, give standing to a man in the

South, however poor he may be. Money is, with few exceptions, the only thing

that ennobles at the North. We have poor among us. But none who are over-

worked and under-fed. We do not crowd cities because lands are abundant and

their owners kind, merciful and hospitable. The poor are as hospitable as the

rich, the negro as the white man. Nobody dreams of turning a friend, a relative,

or a stranger from his door. The very negro who deems it no crime to steal,

would scorn to sell his hospitality. We have no loafers, because the poor relative

or friend who borrows our horse, or spends a week under our roof, is a welcome

guest. The loose economy, the wasteful mode of living at the South, is a blessing

when rightly considered; it keeps want, scarcity and famine at a distance, because

it leaves room for retrenchment. The nice, accurate economy of France, England

and New England, keeps society always on the verge of famine, because it leaves

no room to retrench, that is to live on a part only of what they now consume.

Our society exhibits no appearance of precocity, no symptoms of decay. A long

course of continuing improvement is in prospect before us, with no limits which

human foresight can descry. Actual liberty and equality with our white popula-

tion has been approached much nearer than in the free States. Few of our whites

ever work as day laborers, none as cooks, scullions, ostlers, body servants, or in

other menial capacities. One free citizen does not lord it over another; hence

that feeling of independence and equality that distinguishes us; hence that pride

of character, that self-respect, that give us ascendancy when we come in contact

with Northerners. It is a distinction to be a Southerner, as it was once to be a

Roman Citizen.

4. African American Josiah Henson Portrays the Violence

and Fears in Slave Life, 1858

I was born June 15th, 1789, in Charles County, Maryland…. My mother was a

slave of Dr. Josiah McPherson, but hired to the Mr. Newman to whom my fa-

ther belonged. The only incident I can remember which occurred while my

mother continued on Mr. Newman’s farm, was the appearance one day of my

father with his head bloody and his back lacerated. He was beside himself with

mingled rage and suffering. The explanation I picked up from the conversation

of others only partially explained the matter to my mind; but as I grew older I

understood it all. It seemed the overseer had sent my mother away from the

other field hands to a retired place, and after trying persuasion in vain, had re-

sorted to force to accomplish a brutal purpose. Her screams aroused my father at

his distant work, and running up, he found his wife struggling with the man.

Josiah Henson, Uncle Tom’s Story of His Life: An Autobiography of the Rev. Josiah Henson (London: 1877).

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Furious at the sight, he sprung upon him like a tiger. In a moment the overseer

was down, and, mastered by rage, my father would have killed him but for the

entreaties of my mother, and the overseer’s own promise that nothing should be

said of the matter. The promise was kept—like most promises of the cowardly

and debased—as long as the danger lasted….

… The authorities were soon in pursuit of my father. The fact of the sacri-

legious act of lifting a hand against the sacred temple of a white man’s body …

this was all it was necessary to establish. And the penalty followed: one hundred

lashes on the bare back, and to have the right ear nailed to the whipping-post,

and then severed from the body….

The day for the execution of the penalty was appointed. The Negroes from

the neighboring plantations were summoned, for their moral improvement, to

witness the scene. A powerful blacksmith named Hewes laid on the stripes. Fifty

were given, during which the cries of my father might be heard a mile, and then

a pause ensued. True, he had struck a white man, but as valuable property he

must not be damaged. Judicious men felt his pulse. Oh! he could stand the

whole. Again and again the thong fell on his lacerated back. His cries grew

fainter and fainter, till a feeble groan was the only response to his final blows.

His head was then thrust against the post, and his right ear fastened to it with a

tack; a swift pass of a knife, and the bleeding member was left sticking to the

place. Then came a hurrah from the degraded crowd, and the exclamation,

“That’s what he’s got for striking a white man.” A few said, “it’s a damned

shame”; but the majority regarded it as but a proper tribute to their offended

majesty….

… [F]rom this hour he became utterly changed. Sullen, morose, and dog-

ged, nothing could be done with him. The milk of human kindness in his heart

was turned to gall…. No fear or threats of being sold to the far south—the great-

est of all terrors to the Maryland slave—would render him tractable. So off he

was sent to Alabama. What was his fate neither my mother nor I have ever

learned….

Our term of happy union as one family was now, alas! at an end. Mournful

as was [Dr. McPherson’s] death to his friends it was a far greater calamity to us.

The estate and the slaves must be sold and the proceeds divided among the heirs.

We were but property—not a mother, and the children God had given her.

Common as are slave-auctions in the southern states, and naturally as a slave

may look forward to the time when he will be put upon the block, still the full

misery of the event—of the scenes which precede and succeed it—is never un-

derstood till the actual experience comes. The first sad announcement that the

sale is to be; the knowledge that all ties of the past are to be sundered; the frantic

terror at the idea of being “sent south”; the almost certainty that one member of

a family will be torn from another; the anxious scanning of purchasers’ faces; the

agony at parting, often forever, with husband, wife, child—these must be seen

and felt to be fully understood. Young as I was then, the iron entered into my

soul. The remembrance of breaking up of McPherson’s estate is photographed in

its minutest features in my mind. The crowd collected around the stand, the

huddling group of Negroes, the examination of muscle, teeth, the exhibition of

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agility, the look of the auctioneer, the agony of my mother—I can shut my eyes

and see them all.

My brothers and sisters were bid off first, and one by one, while my mother,

paralyzed by grief, held me by the hand. Her turn came, and she was bought by

Isaac Riley of Montgomery County. Then I was offered to the assembled pur-

chasers. My mother, half distracted by the thought of parting forever from all her

children, pushed through the crowd, while the bidding for me was going on, to

the spot where Riley was standing. She fell at his feet and clung to his knees,

entreating him in tones that a mother only could command, to buy her baby

as well as herself, and spare to her one, at least of her little ones. Will it, can it

be believed that this man, thus appealed to, was capable not merely of turning a

deaf ear to her supplication, but of disengaging himself from her with such vio-

lent blows and kicks, as to reduce her to the necessity of creeping out of his

reach, and mingling the groan of bodily suffering with the sob of a breaking

heart? As she crawled away from the brutal man I heard her sob out, “Oh,

Lord Jesus, how long, how long shall I suffer this way!” I must have been then

between five and six years old. I seem to see and hear my poor weeping mother

now. This was one of my earliest observations of men; an experience which I

only shared with thousands of my race.

5. Southern Author Daniel Hundley Robinson

Depicts the White Yeoman Farmer, 1860

And of all the hardy sons of toil, in all free lands the Yeomen are most deserving

of our esteem. With hearts of oak and thews of steel, crouching to no man and

fearing no danger, these are equally bold to handle a musket on the field of battle

or to swing their reapers in times of peace among the waving stalks of yellow

grain….

Know, then, that the Poor Whites of the South constitute a separate class to

themselves; the Southern Yeomen are as distinct from them as the Southern

Gentleman is from the Cotton Snob. Certainly the Southern Yeoman are nearly

always poor, at least so for as this world’s goods are to be taken into the account.

As a general thing they own no slaves; and even in case they do, the wealthiest

of them rarely possess more than from ten to fifteen. But even when they are

slaveholders, they seem to exercise but few of the rights of ownership over their

human chattels, making so little distinction between master and man, that their

negroes invariably become spoiled, like so many rude children who have been

unwisely spared the rod by the foolish guardians….

Again, should you go among the hardy yeomanry of Tennessee, Kentucky,

or Missouri, whenever or wherever they own slaves (which in these States is not

often the case) you will invariably see the negroes and their masters ploughing

side by side in the fields; or bared to the waist, and with old-fashioned scythe

[vying] with one another who can cut down the broadest swatch of yellow

D. R. Hundley, Esq., Social Relations in Our Southern States (New York: Henry B. Price, 1860), 192–193, 197, 219.

AGRICULTURE AND SLAVERY IN THE SOUTH AT MIDCENTURY

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wheat, or of the waving timothy; or bearing the tall stalks of maize and packing

them into the stout-built barn, with ear and fodder on, ready for the winter’s

husking. And when the long winter evenings have come, you will see blacks

and whites sing, and shout, and husk in company, to the music of Ole Virginny

reels played on a greasy fiddle by some aged Uncle Edward….

[T]he Southern Yeomanry are almost unanimously pro-slavery in sentiment.

Nor do we see how any honest, thoughtful person can reasonably find fault with

them on this account. Only consider their circumstances, negrophilist of the

North, and answer truthfully; were you so situated would you dare to advocate

emancipation? Were you situated as the Southern Yeoman are—humble in

worldly position, patient delvers in the soil, daily earning your bread by the toil-

some sweat of your own brows—would you be pleased to see four millions of

inferior blacks suddenly raised from a position of vassalage, and placed upon an

equality with yourselves? made the sharers of your toil, the equals and associates

of your wives and children? You know you would not. Despite your maudlin

affectation of sympathy in behalf of the Negro, you are yet inwardly conscious

that you heartily despise the sotty African, and that you deny to even the few

living in your own midst an equality of rights and immunities with yourselves.

6. Harriet Jacobs Deplores Her Risks

in Being a Female Slave, 1861

During the first years of my service in Dr. Flint’s family, I was accustomed to

share some indulgences with the children of my mistress. Though this seemed

to me no more than right, I was grateful for it, and tried to merit the kindness

by the faithful discharge of my duties. But I now entered on my fifteenth year—

a sad epoch in the life of a slave girl. My master began to whisper foul words in

my ear. Young as I was, I could not remain ignorant of their import. I tried to

treat them with indifference or contempt. The master’s age, my extreme youth,

and the fear that his conduct would be reported to my grandmother, made him

bear this treatment for many months. He was a crafty man, and resorted to many

means to accomplish his purposes. Sometimes he had stormy, terrific ways, that

made his victims tremble; sometimes he assumed a gentleness that he thought

must surely subdue…. He peopled my young mind with unclean images, such

as only a vile monster could think of. I turned from him with disgust and hatred.

But he was my master. I was compelled to live under the same roof with him—

where I saw a man forty years my senior daily violating the most sacred com-

mandments of nature. He told me I was his property; that I must be subject to

his will in all things…. No matter whether the slave girl be as black as ebony or

as fair as her mistress. In either case, there is no shadow of law to protect her

from insult, from violence, or even from death…. The mistress, who ought to

protect the helpless victim, has no other feelings towards her but those of

Harriet Jacobs, The Trials of Girlhood (1861), as reprinted in Our Nation’s Archive, ed. Erik Brunn and Jay Crosby (New

York: Black Dog and Leventhal Publishers, 1999). 291–293.

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jealousy and rage. The degradation, the wrongs, the vices that grow out of slav-

ery, are more than I can describe. They are greater than you would willingly

believe. Surely, if you credited one half the truths that are told you concerning

the helpless millions suffering in this cruel bondage, you at the north would not

help to tighten the yoke. You surely would refuse to do for the master, on your

own soil, the mean and cruel work which trained bloodhounds and the lowest

class of whites do for him at the south….

I once saw two beautiful children playing together. One was a fair white

child; the other was her slave, and also her sister. When I saw them embracing

each other, and heard their joyous laughter, I turned sadly away from the lovely

sight. I foresaw the inevitable blight that would fall on the little slave’s heart.

I knew how soon her laughter would be changed to sighs. The fair child grew

up to be a still fairer woman. From childhood to womanhood her pathway was

blooming with flowers, and overarched by a sunny sky. Scarcely one day of her

life had been clouded when the sun rose on her happy bridal morning.

How had those years dealt with her slave sister, the little playmate of her

childhood? She, also, was very beautiful; but the flowers and sunshine of love

were not for her. She drank the cup of sin, and shame, and misery, whereof

her persecuted race are compelled to drink.

In view of these things, why are ye silent, ye free men and women of the north?

Why do your tongues falter in maintenance of the right? Would that I had more

ability! But my heart is so full, and my pen is so weak! There are noble men and

women who plead for us, striving to help those who cannot help themselves. God

bless them! God give them strength and courage to go on! God bless those, every

where, who are laboring to advance the cause of humanity!

7. Southerner Mary Chestnut Describes Her Hatred of Slavery

from a White Woman’s View, 1861

I wonder if it be a sin to think slavery a curse to any land. Men and women are

punished when their masters and mistresses are brutes, not when they do wrong.

Under slavery, we live surrounded by prostitutes, yet an abandoned woman is

sent out of any decent house. Who thinks any worse of a Negro or mulatto

woman for being a thing we can’t name? God forgive us, but ours is a monstrous

system, a wrong and an iniquity! Like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in

one house with their wives and their concubines; and the mulattoes one sees in

every family partly resemble the white children. Any lady is ready to tell you

who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household but her

own. Those, she seems to think, drop from the clouds. My disgust sometimes is

boiling over. Thank God for my country women, but alas for the men! They are

probably no worse than men everywhere, but the lower their mistresses, the

more degraded they must be….

Mary Boykin Chestnut, A Diary from Dixie (1861), ed. Ben Ames Williams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), 21–22,

122–l23, 162.

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I hate slavery. You say there are no more fallen women on a plantation than

in London, in proportion to numbers; but what do you say to this? A magnate

who runs a hideous black harem with its consequences under the same roof with

his lovely white wife, and his beautiful and accomplished daughters? He holds his

head as high and poses as the model of all human virtues to these poor women

whom God and the laws have given him. From the height of his awful majesty,

he scolds and thunders at them, as if he never did wrong in his life. Fancy such a

man finding his daughter reading “Don Juan.”“You with that immoral book!”

And he orders her out of his sight. You see, Mrs. Stowe did not hit the sorest

spot. She makes Legree a bachelor.

Someone said: “Oh, I know hal f a Legree [villain in Uncle Tom’s Cabin], a

man said to be as cruel as Legree. But the other half of him did not correspon d.

He was a man of polished man ners, and the b est h usband and father and

church member in the world.”“Can that be so?”“Yes, I know it. And

I knew the dissolu te half of Legree. He was high and m ighty, but the kindest

creature to his slaves; and the unfortunate results of his bad ways were not

sold. They had not to jump over ice blocks. They were kept in ful l view,

and were provided for, handsomely, in his will. His wife an d daughters, in their

purity and innocence, are supposed never to dream of what is as plain before

their eyes as the sunlight. And they play their parts of unsuspecting angels

to the letter. They pro fes s to adore their father as the model of all earthly

goodness .”

“Well, yes. If he is rich, he is the fountain from whence all [blessings] flow.”

“The one I have in my eye, my half of Legree, the dissolute half, was so

furious in his temper, and so thundered his wrath at the poor women that they

were glad to let him do as he pleased if they could only escape his everlasting

fault-finding and noisy bluster.”…

“… The make-believe angels were of the last century…. Women were

brought up not to judge their fathers or their husbands. They took them as the

Lord provided, and were thankful.”…

“You wander from the question I asked. Are Southern men worse because

of the slave system, and the facile black women?”

“Not a bit! They see too much of them. The barroom people don’tdrink,the

confectionary people loathe candy. Our men are sick of the black sight of them!”…

Martha Adamson is a beautiful mulattress, as good looking as they ever are

to me. I have never seen a mule as handsome as a horse, and I know I never

will; no matter how I lamen t and sympathize with its undeserved mule condi-

tion. She is a train ed sempstress, and “hired her own time, as they call it; that is,

the owner pays doctor’s bills, finds food and clothing, and the slave pays his mas-

ter five dollars a month, more or less, and makes a dollar a day if he pleases.

Martha, to the amazement of everybo dy, married a coal-black Negro, the son

of Dick the Barber, who was set fre e fifty years ago for faithful services rendered

Mr. Chestnut’s grandfather. She was asked: How could she? She is so nearly

white. How could she marry that horrid Negro? It is positively shocking! She

answered that she inherits the taste of her white father, that her mother was

black.

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8. Northerner Frederick Law Olmsted

Depicts the Economic Costs of Slavery, 1861

One of the grand errors out of which this rebellion has grown came from sup-

posing that whatever nourishes wealth and gives power to an ordinary civilized

community must command as much for a slaveholding community. The truth

has been overlooked that the accumulation of wealth and the power of a nation

are contingent not merely upon the primary value of the surplus of productions

of which it has to dispose, but very largely also upon the way in which the in-

come from its surplus is distributed and reinvested. Let a man be absent from

almost any part of the North twenty years, and he is struck, on his return, by

what we call the “improvements” which have been made: better buildings,

churches, schoolhouses, mills, railroads, etc. In New York city alone, for in-

stance, at least two hundred millions of dollars have been reinvested merely in

an improved housing of the people; in labour-saving machinery, waterworks,

gasworks, etc., and much more. It is not difficult to see where the profits of

our manufacturers and merchants are. Again, go into the country, and there is

no end of substantial proof of twenty years of agricultural prosperity, not alone

in roads, canals, bridges, dwellings, barns and fences, but in books and furniture,

and gardens, and pictures, and in the better dress and evidently higher education

of the people. But where will the returning traveller see the accumulated cotton

profits of twenty years in Mississippi? Ask the cotton-planter for them, and he

will point in reply, not to dwellings, libraries, churches, schoolhouses, mills, rail-

roads, or anything of the kind; he will point to his negroes—to almost nothing

else. Negroes such as stood for five hundred dollars once, now represent a thou-

sand dollars. We must look then in Virginia and those Northern Slave States

which have the monopoly of supplying negroes for the real wealth which the

sale of cotton has brought to the South. But where is the evidence of it? where

anything to compare with the evidence of accumulated profits to be seen in any

Free State? If certain portions of Virginia have been a little improving, others

unquestionably have been deteriorating, growing shabbier, more comfortless,

less convenient. The total increase in wealth of the population during the last

twenty years shows for almost nothing. One year’s improvements of a Free State

exceed it all.

It is obvious that to the community at large, even in Virginia, the profits of

supplying negroes to meet the wants occasioned by the cotton demand have not

compensated for the bar which the high cost of all sorts of human service, which

the cotton demand has also occasioned, has placed upon all other means of ac-

cumulating wealth; and this disadvantage of the cotton monopoly is fully expe-

rienced by the negro-breeders themselves, in respect to everything else they have

to produce or obtain.

Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveler’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States,I

(New York: Mason Brothers, 1861), 24–26.

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9. Three Slave Songs Recorded by Whites, 1867

“GIVE UP THE WORLD.”

De sun give a light in de heaven all round,

Why don’t you give up de world?

My brud-der don’t you give up de world?

My brud - der, don ’t you give up de world?

We must leave de world be - hind.

“MANY THOUSAND GO.”

“No more peck o’ corn for me,

No more, no more,-

No more peck o’ corn for me,

Many tousand go.

“No more driver’s lash for me, (Twice.)

No more, &c.

“No more pint o’ salt for me, (Twice.)

No more, &c.

“No more hundred lash for me, (Twice.)

No more, &c.

“No more mistress’ call for me,

No more, No more,-

No more mistress’ call for me,

Many tousand go.”

“I WANT TO GO HOME.”

“Dere’s no rain to wet you,

O, yes, I want to go home.

Dere’s no sun to burn you,

O, yes, I want to go home;

O, push along, believers,

O, yes, &c.

Dere’s no hard trials,

O, yes, &c.

Slave Songs of the United States (1867).

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Dere’s no whips a-crackin’,

O, yes, &c.

My brudder on de wayside,

O, yes, &c.

O, push along, my brudder,

O, yes, &c.

Where dere’s no stormy weather,

O, yes, &c.

Dere’s no tribulation,

O, yes, &c.”

ESSAYS

The contradictions of a world of slaves and slaveholders in a nation that prided

itself on individual freedom and rights have long occupied historians. Scholars

have considered how white slaveholders reconciled their commitments to liberty

with their commitments to slavery. Moreover, scholars have examined how

slaves used these contradictions to carve out greater power in what by all

accounts was a brutal institution. The two essays in this chapter illustrate how

historians have stressed the incongruities of freedom and slavery. Walter Johnson,

a historian at Harvard University, focuses on the slave trade, which laid bare the

horrors of slavery. If slaveholders could argue that life as a slave was eased by a

master-slave paternalism, they found it much more difficult to explain away the

commodification of people that were bought and sold. In the slave trade, slavery

was clearly a business of buying and selling goods. Anthony Kaye, who teaches

history at Penn State University, focuses not on the mobility of slaves as em-

blematic of the Old South, but on the neighborhoods and families created and

imagined by African Americans. Kaye shows how slaves created space in their

worlds in terms of neighborhoods, intimate relationships, and struggle. Whereas

Johnson finds mobility and capitalism at the core of southern slaveholding, Kaye

finds neighborhoods and family life at the core of slaves’ lives.

Slaves and the “Commerce” of the Slave Trade

WALTER JOHNSON

The history of the antebellum South was made (and occasionally unmade) in the

slaves pens. There, through the black arts of the trade, people were turned into

products and sold at a price; there, human bodies were stripped, examined, and

Reprinted by permission at the publisher from Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market by Walter Johnson,

College.

AGRICULTURE AND SLAVERY IN THE SOUTH AT MIDCENTURY

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assigned meaning according to the brutal anatomy lessons of slaveholding ideol-

ogy; there, slaveholders daily gambled their own fantasies of freedom on the be-

havior of the people whom they could never fully commodify; there, enslaved

people fashioned communities and identities that enabled them to survive one of

the most brutal forcible dislocations of human history; and there, sometimes,

slaves were able to shape a sale to suit themselves. In the slave market, slave-

holders and slaves were fused into an unstable mutuality which made it hard to

tell where one’s history ended and the others began. Every slave had a price, and

slaves’ communities, their families, and their own bodies were suffused with the

threat of sale, whether they were in the pens or not. And every slaveholder lived

through the stolen body of a slave.

In the half century before the Civil War, the back-and-forth bargaining of

slaveholder and slave was repeated two million times in a pattern that traced the

outline of southern history. Central to this history was the role played by the

interstate trade in the transformation of the South from a declining tobacco

economy stretched along the eastern seaboard to a thriving cotton economy

that reached westward as far as Texas. Right behind the soldiers and squatters

who, during the first quarter of the nineteenth century, began to drive the Indian

inhabitants of the lower South into the arid plains of the West came the slave

traders and the coffles of people who, through their labor and reproduction,

transformed those rich and emptied lands into “The Cotton Kingdom” in the

century’s second quarter. Of the million or so slaves who moved southwest and

transformed the depopulated forests of the deep South into the richest staple-

producing region of the world, two thirds were carried there by slave traders.

The transformation of the slaveholders’ economy brought with it a transfor-

mation of the lives of the slaves upon whom it depended. Most important were

the separations. The trade decimated the slave communities of the upper South

through waves of exportation determined by slaveholders’ shifting demand—first

men, then women, and finally children became featured categories of trade. As

they were driven south and west by the people they called “soul drivers,” those

slaves carried with them the cultural forms—the songs, the stories, the family

names, and the religion—out of which they forged the commonalities that sup-

ported their daily struggle against slavery. By the time of the Civil War, southern

slaves had a common culture that stretched from Maryland to Texas, a spirited

mirror-image of the pattern traced by the trade in their bodies. Indeed, as war

broke out, settled communities and rebuilt families were beginning to emerge at

the trade’s southern outlet.

Even as it transformed the geography of both white and black life in the

South, the criss-crossed pattern of the slave trade knit the political economy of

slavery into a cohesive whole. Long after intensive tobacco farming had eroded

the fertility and profitability of the slave-cultivated fields of the Chesapeake, the

slave trade enabled Virginia and Maryland planters to retain their ties to the po-

litical economy of slavery. As much as anything else in the years leading up to

the Civil War, the planters of the Chesapeake were slave farmers who held onto

their wealth and status by supplying the cotton boom with the offspring of slaves

idled by the decline of tobacco. Even as the political economy of slavery moved

372 MAJOR PROBLEMS IN AMERICAN HISTORY

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Cobbs-Hoffman Elizabeth, Blum Edward J., Gjerde Jon. Major Problems in American History, Volume I, 3 edition (ENG)

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