Authors: Fergus Bordewich
The punishment of slaves for serious infractions was at times obscene by modern standards, but less so in an age that believed in natural inequality, and utterly lacked contemporary ideas of human rights. As Josiah Henson cruelly learned, the amputation of ears, as well as toes and fingers, was standard, and castration and burning at the stake were not unknown. In 1736 a Methodist minister heard a South Carolina slave owner recommend that one “first nail up a Negro by the ears, then order him to be whipped in the severest manner, and then to have scalding water thrown over him.” Moses Roper's owner punished him for attempting to escape by pouring tar on his head, rubbing it over his face, and setting it on fire, although he put the fire out, Roper noted, “before it did me very great injury.” After another escape attempt, Roper's left hand was placed in a vise and squeezed until all his fingernails peeled off. In the 1830s William Wells Brown, another chronic runaway, was first whipped and then tied up in the smokehouse and subjected to a fire of tobacco stems, a technique referred to as a “decent smoking,” by his innkeeper master. The harshest punishments of all were reserved for those who physically attacked whites. When a slave girl belonging to the comparatively enlightened William Dunbar was convicted of killing a white, her hand was first cut off, and she was then hanged.
A blow struck against one white man was considered a blow against all, an act of rebellion that was not to be tolerated in areas where slaves sometimes far outnumbered whites. The French-American farmer and author Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur learned this one evening in 1783,
while walking to dinner in the suburbs of Charleston, when he came upon a scene that shocked his philosophical sensibility. “I perceived a negro, suspended in the cage, left there to expire!” he wrote. The cage hung from a tree alongside the path. Around it, birds of prey fluttered looking for a perch. “I shudder when I recollect that the birds had already picked out his eyes: his cheek bones were bare; his arms had been attacked in several places, and his body seemed covered with a multitude of wounds. From the edges of the hollow sockets, and from the lacerations with which he was disfigured, the blood slowly dropped, and tinged the ground beneath. No sooner were the birds flown, than swarms of insects covered the whole body of this unfortunate wretch eager to feed on his mangled flesh and to drink his blood.” Crèvecoeur managed to give a little water to the man, who told him that he had been hanging in the cage for two days as punishment for killing the overseer of the plantation on which he had worked. Later, over dinner, Crèvecoeur's hosts explained that such executions were rendered necessary by the “laws of self-preservation.”
4
At the end of the eighteenth century, slaves thus lived under a regime in which fear was woven into the fabric of life, the threat of savage punishment was horrifyingly explicit, and the obstacles to a general revolution were insurmountable. Slaves could run away, and often did. But the great majority didn't run far. Late eighteenth-century advertisements for runaways in the
Virginia Gazette
offer some idea of where they went. Peter, a slave “who speaks very broken” and “has a down look,” was supposed to be lurking around his wife's dwelling “in the lower part of the county.” Stepney Blue had acquired a forged pass as a free man and was supposed to be “hiring himself out somewhere in the region.” Caesar, who escaped near Prince Edward Courthouse, may have gone to Cumberland County where he was raised, “and must have formed some connections.” Gabriel, a weaver, had forged a pass and may be seeking to board a vessel to get out of the colony. An older couple, Toby and Betty, may have made off by water to North Carolina, where they originally came from. Of these fugitives, only Gabriel the weaver was striking out for complete freedom in
some distant place. The rest, like the vast majority of runaways, had chosen to take their chances close to where they had been enslaved, apparently counting on poor communications to save them from recapture. But none of them could count on permanent safety.
From the earliest days of colonization, the law recognized runaway slaves as a problem. The United States Constitution explicitly required that fugitives from “service or labour” in any state be delivered up to their owner. To this was added, in 1793, the nation's first Fugitive Slave Act, which empowered a fugitive's master or a hired slave catcher to seize him and return him to the state from which he had fled, with the usually pro forma approval of a local magistrate. Both the law and public opinion so favored slave owners that as the new century approached, for fugitive slaves, there was no safe haven anywhere. Although there were growing numbers of men and women who opposed slavery for religious reasons, few believed that they had a
moral
right to break the law to help runaways. Slavery in some form was still legal in every Northern state except Vermont. In 1776 there were six and a half thousand black slaves in Connecticut, and fifteen thousand in New York state, only one thousand fewer than in Georgia as late as 1790. Fugitives managed to escape into wilderness regions, but by the late eighteenth century these were shrinking east of the Alleghenies. Moreover, most slaves were no better fitted to survive on their own than white men stripped of the accoutrements of civilization. Some slaves also escaped into Indian country, but they were as likely to be enslaved there or sold back to their masters, as they were to be welcomed as free men. Canada was still little known to slaves even in the Northeast, and in any case slavery was still legal there too, though no longer common.
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T
he story of James Mars and his family suggests the prospects that fugitives faced, even where slavery was rare and whites sympathetic. Mars, who was born in 1790, his parents, a brother, and a sister belonged to a minister named Thompson, who lived in Canaan, Connecticut, in the rugged, thinly populated northwest corner of the state. Thompson, who was married to a Southern woman, had strong proslavery sentiments, and at a time when antislavery sentiment was spreading in New England, preached from the pulpit that God himself had sanctioned the institution.
Thompson had acquired property in Virginia, and in 1798 decided to move there permanently, taking along his slaves. Mars's father, however, was determined not to let his family be carried south, and carefully planned their escape on the eve of Thompson's departure. The elder Mars had learned that the inhabitants of the neighboring town of Norfolk were feuding with those in Canaan, for reasons unknown to him, and now lost to history. It is likely that he had already received encouragement from antislavery families in Canaan. In any event, as James Mars put it in a brief memoir later in life, the family threw itself on the mercy of people there. Initially, all went according to plan. As hoped, the Mars family was welcomed in Norfolk, eight miles to the east along the valley of the Blackberry River. There they were sheltered, fed, and protected for the next several weeks by an impressive number of townspeople, who included a number of Norfolk's most respected families. Their first host was none other than Giles Pettibone, the town's representative in the state assembly, as well as its treasurer and justice of the peace. For a time, the Marses were lent an empty house, and then, when Thompson was reported to be on their trail, they were led to a remote home occupied by “a very pleasant family.” A visiting law student took Mars's older brother to his own home across the state line in Massachusetts. Meanwhile, Thompson somehow managed to make contact with the elder Marses and convinced them to return with him to Canaan to help him pack his belongings for the journey to Virginia. After a day or two, the Marses panicked and fled a second time to Norfolk, where they stayed at a popular tavern owned by Luther Lawrence, a Revolutionary War veteran. A human shell game now ensued. Whenever Lawrence heard that Thompson was in the area, he would send the Marses to hide in the surrounding woods. Sometimes the members of the family were separated. Eight-year-old James was sent to stay with Nathaniel Pease, a prosperous shoemaker, almost all the way back to Canaan, then with a man named Camp, then with someone named Akins, then a Foot family, then another Akins. This went on for weeks. The entire time, Thompson continued to propose deals: he would take the boys and give the parents their freedom; he would keep the parents and free the boys. Eventually the Marses became convinced that there was no safe place for them to live. Through intermediaries, a deal was made. Thompson proposed to sell the boys until they were twenty-five years of age (as permitted by Connecticut law) to somebody whom the elder
Marses would select. He would give the other members of the family their freedom. Buyers acceptable to the Mars parents were found in towns about fifteen miles apart, and the boys were sold to them for one hundred pounds each, in September 1798.
In this story, several important truths emerge. A surprising number of ordinary citizens were willing to ignore the law temporarily, and able to mobilize networks of family and friendsâprecisely what would later knit together the Underground Railroadâin an effort to keep the Mars family out of their master's hands. It is also clear that, especially in the person of Giles Pettibone, the local authorities were willing to turn a blind eye to activities that must have been obvious in a town as small as Norfolk. Indeed, several of the families who sheltered the Marses lived in homes only a few hundred feet apart, on or near the village green, the center of town. Mars never clarifies the motivation of the people who helped him and his family. The unspecified animosity between the inhabitants of the two towns may have played a part in the story, but it can hardly explain all the effort that the people of Norfolk undertook in the fugitives' behalf. Many of them must have helped the Marses because they believed it was the right thing to do. But it is also clear that there was no larger organization in place, no system for moving the fugitives far beyond the reach of the persistent parson. At no point during their odyssey were the Marses ever more than ten or fifteen miles from Thompson's home. In the end, there was no alternative to at least some of the family's reenslavement. In 1798, for the Mars family, despite a good plan, knowledge of the region and its people, great personal determination, and white friends, slavery was a fact from which there was still no escape.
I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever.
âT
HOMAS
J
EFFERSON
1
It is possible that the eleven-year-old Josiah Hensonânow settled with his mother on Isaac Riley's farm, in Marylandâknew at least something about what was happening on March 4, 1801. Since he was illiterate, he could not read the
National Intelligencer
, the local newspaper, which in recent days had been carrying reports on the new president-elect Thomas Jefferson and his vice president Aaron Burr, the appointment of John Marshall as Chief Justice of the United States, and the gala inaugural gathering just a few miles away in Washington. But he surely heard whites talking about such things, along with news of the recent sale of public lots at Tunnicliff's Hotel, and the arrival of a shipment of wines for local sale. Even if news of the inauguration penetrated the slave quarters on the
George Town Road, it would have had little immediate significance to a boy who knew the young nation's ringing declarations of liberty and equality were intended to apply exclusively to white men.
A little before noon, Jefferson left Conrad and McMunn's boardinghouse and, disdaining the pompous trappings of the state carriage that had been provided, democratically set out on foot toward the still-unfinished Capitol, where he was to take the oath of office. The new city, like the young nation itself, was still more an idea, more a hopeful plan than an established reality. Jefferson's walk that morning took him through what was essentially a worksite whose grandly named avenues were still troughs of red mud cluttered with alder trees and stumps, where only a relative handful of unimposing buildings lay scattered between patches of woods and the Potomac River. Even the president's official residenceânot yet known as the White Houseâwas still under construction. Cannon roared as Jefferson entered the north wing of the Capitol, the only concession to ceremony that the champion of the small farmers, and mechanics, and men of little property countenanced on this historic day, when power would pass, at least symbolically, into their hands and out of those of the Federalists.
When he raised his hand to take the oath from John Marshall, his cousin and political rival, the fifty-eight-year-old Jefferson was becoming president less of a stable union sharing a deep sense of common interest, than of a political confection that resembled the tacked-together Yugoslavia of the late twentieth century, a loose agglomeration of mini-states protective of their autonomy, and suspicious of encroachment by their weak central government. It was a simple, rural nation whose population was smaller than that of Ireland. Its largest city, Philadelphia, numbered seventy thousand inhabitants, and its constituent parts were linked by roads that were little more than rambling tracks sketched through the forest. The writ of the national government barely reached beyond the Appalachians, into lands that were still inhabited by powerful Indian nations who occupied most of the territory between the mountains and the Mississippi River. Indeed, only a few years earlier, the country had suffered the worst defeat ever to befall Americans at the hands of Indians, the loss of more than eight hundred men on the banks of the Wabash River, in present-day Indiana. Spaniards governed Florida; and the French, New Orleans and most of the Mississippi Valley. It was a country in
which inequalities of class, gender, and race were ingrained and largely unquestioned.
The prospect of Jefferson's election had thrown fear into the hearts of many Americans. During the recent campaign, he had been denounced by his opponents as a “vulgar demagogue” and a “bold atheist,” who would undertake “dangerous innovations.” He owed his very election to the disproportionate power of the slave states in the Electoral College, a fact that infuriated legislators from New England. Now, however, his gracious demeanor, his acute intelligence, and more than anything else his conciliatory words reassured even Marshall, the leader of the Federalists, who had feared that Jefferson as president might prove to be an “absolute terrorist.” When he began to speak, Jefferson's reedy voice barely reached the ears of his audience, who strained to catch every pregnant word. What he had to say was exquisite in its eloquence, fusing soaring idealism with the hard realities of politics.
The speech was Jefferson at his most seductive. “We are all Republicansâwe are all Federalists,” he declared, directly addressing his wary, not to say vengeful, opponents in the chamber. “If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it. I know, indeed, that some honest men fear that a republican government cannot be strong; that this government is not strong enough. But would the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon a government which has so far kept us free and firm, on the theoretic and visionary fear that this government, the world's best hope, may by possibility want energy to preserve itself? I trust not.” He went on to describe his glowing vision of a rising nation, spread over a wide and fruitful land, traversing the seas with the rich productions of its industry, “advancing rapidly to destinies beyond the reach of mortal eye.”
Jefferson never mentioned slavery. But the moral freight of his words could hardly be missed by anyoneâthey were still few, it is true, but their numbers were growingâwho believed that simple justice demanded the emancipation of those in bondage. He promised “equal and exact justice to all men,” the guarantee of equal rights for minorities, and a government “which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and
improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread that it has earned.” Jefferson did not, of course, intend his words for Josiah Henson and the 896,848 other slaves in the sixteen states of the federal union. (Vermont had become a state in 1791, Kentucky in 1792, and Tennessee in 1796.) Although he passionately hated slavery, in the abstract, Jefferson had always accommodated himself to it in practice, and he had no wish to antagonize his many slave-owning supporters. Yet his words ringingly embodied beliefs about justice and equality that underscored the terrible contradictions in a nation that proclaimed its faith in individual liberty while continuing to hold seventeen percent of its inhabitants in bondage.
At fifty-eight, Jefferson's body was still slim and taut, and his “mild and pleasing countenance” radiated optimism. As he stood that day before his assembled countrymen, he embodied many of the deepest contradictions of his young nation. John Quincy Adams would describe him as “a rare mixture of infidel philosophy and epicurean morals, of burning ambition and of stoical self-control, of deep duplicity and of generous sensibility.” He was an aristocrat, a product of the landed Southern gentry, who espoused a vision of the most radical democracy. An early and outspoken enemy of slavery, he was also one of the largest slave owners in Virginia. Slavery was woven inextricably into the fabric of his personal life and his political world. Like other planters, he measured his wealth largely in slaves and land. Slaves had served him since his birth. Nearly two hundred slaves tilled the fields of his estates. Slaves would attend him day in, day out in the president's house. A man who condemned racial mixing in the harshest terms, he carried on a liaison with one of his female slaves that lasted for decades.
Jefferson's enemies accused him of maintaining a sexual relationship with Sally Hemings, a light-skinned slave twenty-seven years his junior, the half-sister of his deceased wife, and said that he had fathered children by her. Jefferson vigorously denied the charge, although such relationships were extremely common. Gossip nonetheless took wing in the form of slanderous doggerel: “
Of all the damsels on the green / On mountain or in valley / A lass so luscious ne'er was seen / As Montecellan Sally
.” Down to the present day, Hemings's descendants cited family tradition as evidence that the relationship had in fact existed, even as Jefferson's defenders dismissed
such assertions as baseless, pointing to Jefferson's deep devotion to the memory of his wife, and to his oft expressed hatred of miscegenation to contradict them. Recent genetic research, though imperfect, has strengthened the Hemings claim and has gradually won over most modern scholars of Jefferson. Such a relationship, supremely private though it was, and ultimately as mysterious as any of the vagaries of the human heart, only deepens the profound ambiguity of Jefferson's professed, and deeply contradictory, attitudes about race.
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Jefferson's racial dilemma, in all its dimensionsâmoral, psychological, emotional, politicalâwas very much that of the nation itself in the early years of the nineteenth century. No American of his time examined his own ideas with more seriousness than Jefferson, a process that has been recounted with thoroughness by John Chester Miller, in
The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery.
In his struggle, and ultimate failure, to find a resolution to the problem of slavery, the uncertainties of the young nation can be seen as in no other single mind. From the grinding stress of that ambivalence would grow the inspiration for the abolitionist movement, and its activist cutting edge, the Underground Railroad, as well as the most bigoted defense of slavery, and the political philosophy of states' rights.
Jefferson embodied the very best in a nation that was increasingly struggling to find a painless way to end slavery, an effort that was doomed to failure from the start. He had, as much as any man living, created the United States, crafted the principles by which it strove to live, and been a part of the compromises that had been necessary to bring the country into being. More than most, he believed that slavery was morally incompatible with white men's freedom, and ultimately a reef upon which the nation might someday founder. In later years, his idealism, like that of many of his generation, would atrophy. Despite protestations to the contrary, he would eventually slip uncomfortably close to the camp of those who embraced slavery and states' rights as pillars of American stability. Yet his
clarion appeals for liberty, which are most memorably enshrined in the immortal words of the Declaration of Independence, would have an impact far beyond his own ultimately class-bound intentions.
Jefferson held no illusions about the inherent cruelty of slavery: a “hideous evil,” he called it. Intellectually, at least, he pitied the suffering of its victims. He also had little patience with the hypocrisy of the patriot “who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment, or death itself in vindication of his own liberty,” but who could still wreak upon others a form of oppression “one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose.” Perhaps most of all, he saw that its corrupting influence on those who owned slaves undermined the hardy self-reliance that he felt was crucial to the survival of democratic institutions. “The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other,” he wrote in “Notes on the State of Virginia,” the fullest expression of his views on the subject. “Our children see this, and learn to imitate itâ¦The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious particularity.” He also feared that the continuation of slavery would inevitably lead to bloody rebellion and race war.
Coupled to Jefferson's hatred of slavery as an institution, however, was an ingrained repugnance toward blacks as human beings. He did not doubt that they were inferior to whites in both body and mind, and considered it to be at least possible that they were “different species of the same genus.” He thought that it would be impossible for the races to live together in freedom, and miscegenation appalled him. As governor of Virginia, he had proposed a bill requiring a white woman who had given birth to a mulatto child to leave the state. Later, as part of a proposed plan for the emancipation of slaves, he suggested that black children be removed from their parents and reared at public expense, and trained either in farming or other trades, girls until the age of eighteen and boys to twenty-one, and then “colonized to such place as the circumstances of the time should render most proper.” It was absolutely essential that they “be removed beyond the reach of mixture.” Their parents, meanwhile, inured to the dependency of slavery, would eventually die off, and white immi
grants would be invited to repopulate the land. For such a supremely rational man, it was a bizarre scheme, and would have required (he calculated) fifty ships per year to deport just the sixty thousand additional blacks who were born annually. “Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus save the expense of supplying, by importation of white settlers, the vacancies they will leave?” he asked, and then answered his own question: “Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.”
Blacks, Jefferson was convinced, were “in reason much inferior” to whites, being congenitally incapable of achievement in mathematics, arts, or science, and in their imagination “dull, tasteless and anomalous.” He also found blacks physically repellent. They suffered from “a strong and disagreeable odor,” while whites were endowed with “a more elegant symmetry of form,” which kindled in blacks a sexual desire “as uniformly as is the preference of the Oranootan [Orangutan] for the black women over those of his own species.” Even their emotions were inferior. They felt griefs less profoundly, and although they were “more ardent after their female,” their love lacked the subtlety of expression that characterized romance among whites.