The Tyranny of Slavery
How did African Americans Survive the cruelty of slavery?
Several inches of snow lay on the ground that February.
Harriet Jacobs silently thanked her grandmother, a freed African
American slave, for giving her a new pair of shoes. The old ones
were so tight that they cut into her feet. But Jacobs’s owners, Dr. And
Mrs. Flint, had little sympathy for the young teenager.
As Jacobs walked past Mrs. Flint, her new shoes squeaked.
The sound annoyed her owner. “Take them off,” Mrs. Flint ordered,
“and if you put them on again, I’ll throw them into the fire.”
Jacobs knew that Mrs. Flint would whip her if she disobeyed,
so she took off the shoes. When Mrs. Flint sent her on an errand,
Jacobs walked barefoot through the snow and got sick. As she lay in
bed, she wished for death rather than to spend the rest of her life with
the Flints. As Jacobs later recalled, “What was my grief in waking up
to find myself quite well.”
Eventually, Jacobs escaped to the North and wrote the story of
her life as a slave. The story, published in 1861, shocked her readers.
She told of African American slaves working the fields from dawn to
sundown. She revealed how African American women were forced to
have children fathered by their white owners or by African American
slaves whom they did not love. She described children ripped from
their mothers’ arms to be sold. She recounted the brutal treatment of
any slave—man or woman—who dared to say no to an owner.
In this chapter, you will read about how for 250 years African
Americans were enslaved. You will also read about how, under a
system in which their owners considered them to be no more than
property, African Americans still carried on a rich cultural life that
reflected their African origins.
1. EARLY YEARS OF SLAVERY
What was life like for enslaved Africans from 1619 to the early
1800s?
For you must both…bear in mind that you remain…your
Master’s Property, and therefore it will be justly expected, both by God
and Man, that you behave and conduct yourselves as Obedient and
faithful Servants toward your respective Masters & Mistresses.
These words form part of a marriage ceremony written by a
white New England minister in the early 1700’s. Some slave owners
allowed their slaves to marry, but they reserved the right to separate
husbands fro wives and sell wither. Children, too, could be sold. This
was one of the most brutal aspects of slavery, especially to people
like the West Africans to whom family life was so important. Yet,
against all odds, African American slaves, descended from many
peoples, created a common culture—including a sense of family—that
made life bearable.
The First Generations. The first generations of Africans to
arrive in English America in the 1600s and 1700s came from many
different West African cultures. Until about the mid-1700s, they spoke
the many different dialects, or forms of language, of the regions of
West Africa from which they came. When Africans from different
places had to work together on the same farms or plantations, they
often had difficulty communicating with one another at first. Only after
two or three generations did English become the common language.
Over time, some African words crept into English—tote, okra, mumbo
jumbo, goober, yam, and gumbo, to list a few.
Ship captains and planters often gave Africans English names.
Renaming Africans was an attempt to strip them of their identities as
individuals. But most new arrivals continued to use their African real
names regardless of what owners called them. An ad in a Georgia
newspaper reflected this fact:
Run aways…TWO NEW NEGRO YOUNG FELLOWS; one of
them…calls himself Golaga, the name given him here Abel; the
other…calls himself Abbrom, the name given him here Bennet.
Many first-generation Africans gave their children African
names. However, slave owners usually re-spelled the names to make
them sound more familiar to English ears. For example, the African
names Quashee, Cudjo, Abbe, and Cuffee became Squash, Joe,
Abby, and Cuff.
As African Americans picked up English, they sometimes
pretended, when it served their purposes, not to understand the
English spoken by whites. They also developed pronunciations and
sayings that had meaning only to them.
Daily Life. The living quarters of African slaves were often not worse
than those of most European colonists in the 1600s. Most people had
little more than a few pieces of furniture, an iron pot or frying pan, and
some animal skins or straw for floor covering. But as time passed and
the slave system grew, differences between Africans’ and Europeans’
living conditions widened. By the 1800s, most Europeans lived in
board or brick houses, while enslaved Africans continued to live in
shacks.
Since slave owners bought Africans to earn profits, they
tended to spend as little as possible on their upkeep. They clothed
them in the cheapest material available—usually a coarse fabric
known as Negro cloth. They fed them rice, corn, beans, slat pork, and
molasses.
Africans turned some of these foods into dishes they had
enjoyed in Africa. They pounded corn into meal and made hoe cakes
or mush similar to African fufu or kenkey. Some dishes such as
spoon bread, a pudding like dumpling, also made their way to the
tables of slave owners.
Working Conditions. Most Africans came from farming
villages and adapted quickly to farming in the Americas. But as
slaves, they faced grueling hours in the field. A 1740 South Carolina
law passed to “protect” Africans gives a glimpse of their working
conditions.
[I]f any owner of slaves…shall work or put such slave or slaves
to labor more than fifteen hours in twenty-four hours… every such
person shall forfeit [give up] a sum not exceeding twenty pounds nor
under five pounds of current money.
Officials rarely collected such fines.
Owners of large plantations worked slaves in gangs. Owners
did leave enough time in a day for slaves to tend their own garden
plots and to have some time for their families. Slave owners soon
found that Africans had their own ways of resisting bad working
conditions. They worked slowly, broke tools, or, in a few cases, set
fire to farm buildings.
Defenses Against Slavery. To forget the pains of slavery,
Africans often turned to activities that reminded them of their
homeland. In the slave quarters, the area that housed slaves on farms
and plantations, they sang African songs. Craft workers made drums
or fashioned three-stringed banjos similar to those used in West
Africa. Africans also brought their dances to English America. The
dances involved hand-clapping, singing, and movement to
complicated rhythms.
Like West Africans’ words and foods, their dances slipped into
the culture of white colonists. In the mid-1700s, one English visitor
was shocked at the sight of Southern colonists swaying to “Congo
minutes” and dancing African-style “jigs.”
Storytellers, similar to West African “griots”, told folktales that
recalled their African homeland. These tales have since become part
of the African American heritage. Some tales described the deeds of
African ancestors or clever slaves. Many tales involved weak,
helpless animals who defeated larger, stronger animals. Especially
popular were the Brer Rabbit stories, in which the clever rabbit
outsmarted such enemies as Brer Fox.
Work Songs. Singing was a way to get through the long day.
There were special songs for picking cotton, for doing the laundry,
and for many other tasks. Most songs, however, expressed a deep
longing for freedom. Said one song:
Rabbit in de briar patch,
Squirrel in de tree,
Wish I could go huntin’,
But I ain’t free.
Family Life. By far the strongest defense against the
cruelties of slavery was the family. Slaves recognized marriages
among themselves even when whites did not. According to tradition, a
couple married by “jumping over the broomstick.” It was bad luck to
stub your toe on the broom, so most couples, said one slave, tried to
fly over the broomstick “like a cricket.” Slaves created a sense of
closeness among themselves by calling one another “brother,”
“sister,” “aunt,” “uncle,” and so on, even when they had no actual
family relationship.
Religion. Time after time, enslaved Africans heard white
ministers tell them that slavery was God’s will. They sat while
ministers pounded home one message-obedience. But they largely
ignored the ministers because they had their own preachers and
spiritual beliefs.
The early generations of Africans in English America believed
that their souls returned to Africa when they died. Some Africans
buried bodies with items needed for the journey--a bow and arrows, a
small canoe and paddle, and some food. But by the mid-1700s many
began to adopt the Christian idea of heaven.
Some enslaved Africans in the South even viewed death as a
positive event. One African, known as Uncle Silas, asked a white
preacher, “Us slaves gonna be free in heaven?” The preacher ignored
the question, but Silas and most other slaves believed the answer
was yes.
Many slave owners read to their slaves from the Bible to try to
impress on them that slavery was God’s will. But Africans had another
view of the Bible stories. In their eyes, they were the Israelites, who
suffered enslavement at the hands of wicked Egyptian pharaohs.
Christianity taught about a gentle Jesus who suffered persecution-and
was set free-on the cross. Where they could, Africans gathered
together in “invisible churches” to hold their own services. These were
places in the woods, away from the eyes of slave owners.
African Americans in the Cotton Kingdom
An African American child named Stephan huddled with his
family in the corner of a slave-trading yard. Their owner had just died,
and his relatives wanted to sell off Stephan’s family. As the slave
trader approached, Stephan’s mother held tightly to him and his two
sisters, Mary and Jane. She begged the trader not to break up the
family.
But the trader had other ideas. To him, the slave trade was a
business. He bought African American slaves from plantation owners
who no longer needed them or who needed money more, and sold
them at a profit to other owners. He did not care that in the process of
buying and selling he broke up families.
Bullwhip in hand, the trader grabbed Mary and shoved her
toward a well-dressed plantation owner. The trader’s words stuck in
Stephen’s mind. “Here’s jes’ the girl you want for a nurse,” said the
trader.
Stephen never forgot the slave-trading yard. He vividly
recalled the scene in his later life:
I was jes’ a little chap,…but I can remember that place like it
happened yesterday
Husbands sold away from wives, and children taken away from
mothers.
A trader, them days, didn’t think no more of selling a baby
or little child away from it’s mother than a little calf away from a cow.
Breaking up families by selling members to distant owners was
much more common after 1793 than before. With the invention of the
cotton gin that year, cotton became the major crop of the South. As a
result, cotton plantations needed the labor of more and more enslaved
African Americans. Thus, slavery became big business, and the life of
African American slaves, never easy, became much harder.
How did it feel to be enslaved on the cotton plantations of the
South? In the 1930s, interviewers put this question to former African
American slaves, many of whom were 75 to 100 years old. Some still
bore deep scars on their backs from the lash of the whip. To be a
slave meant to have no rights at all. “Once they whipped my father,”
said elderly Roberta Mason, “’cause he looked at a slave they killed
and cried.”
From Sunrise to Sunset. Slavery varied form state to state
and from owner to owner. But the worst conditions existed on the
“cotton factories” of the Deep South, the lands that extended west
from Georgia through Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana
to Texas. Nearly ever enslaved African American dreaded the thought
of being “sold down the river” (the Mississippi) to plantations in
Louisiana or Texas. One free African American who was sold down
the river was Solomon Northup.
Solomon Northup was a free African American from New
York. In 1845, while he was visiting Washington, D.C., slave traders
grabbed Northup and shipped him to a slave market in New Orleans.
There, a cotton planter bought him and forced him to work in the
cotton fields for 12 years. After Northup’s freedom was secured by a
family friend in 1853, he published a story of his years as a plantation
slave. The book sold widely and helped whip up antislavery feeling
throughout the North.
Northup wrote how, as a typical field hand on a cotton
plantation, he worked from sunrise to sunset:
“The hands [workers] are required to be in the cotton field as soon as
it is light in the morning, and with the exception of ten or fifteen
minutes, which is given them at noon to swallow their allowance of
cold bacon, they are not permitted to be a moment idle until it is too
dark to see and when the moon is full they often times labor till the
middle of the night.”
trade in African American slaves. By now, most had been born in the
United States. All or almost all spoke English.
On larger plantations, white overseers stood constant watch.
Assisting them were slave drivers, often African American slaves
themselves, who snapped the whip at any worker who lagged.
Although they were hated by other slaves, for slave drivers to do
otherwise meant facing the anger of the plantation owner. A slave
driver could find himself sold away form his family or put to work in the
fields. So, as Northup wrote, “The lash flew from morning to night.”
Each evening, weary slaves trudged home to put away tools,
unload cotton bags, and do the owner’s chores—chop wood, feed
mules, and so on. Then they built fires in their cabins and threw
potatoes or some ash cakes—patties of corn meal and water—onto
the coals to cook. After they ate, they tumbled into bed. An hour
before dawn, a horn or bell awoke them to another day of labor.
Reliance on the Extended Family. As families were
increasingly under the threat of being broken up by slave owners in
the 1800s, the extended family became especially important.
Because slave owners could sell off one or both parents, children
were thought of as belonging to the whole community. Everyone took
part in the care of children. It was the extended family that saw
children through their early years. Harriet Jacobs fondly recalled the
role of her grandmother in raising her. She wrote:
Skilled Workers. By 1860, nearly 75 percent of all African American
slaves worked in the cotton fields. A few, however, worked in the
planter’s mansion called the “big house.” They were skilled craft
workers, tailors, butlers, maids, cooks, and nurses for the owners’
children. Some house servants and planters developed close
personal ties. But even the kindest owners rarely freed African
American slaves until they were old and no longer able to work.
Some owners, both on plantations and in Southern towns and
cities, trained their slaves in various skills such as blacksmithing.
Then they hired out the slaves, receiving pay for their work. Some
owners gave the workers a part of what they earned. In this way,
some African Americans in the South were able to buy their freedom
and that of their families.
African American slaves worked at a variety of jobs, ranging
from ship pilot to carpenter to factory work. They preferred city work
to working on a plantation because they had more freedom and the
hope of earning money. Also, with greater freedom came the
opportunity to escape.
A slave owner who had sold a man’s wife to a distant
plantation might order the man to take another wife. To refuse such
an order took courage, but many men did. Henry “Box” Brown gave
this reason for his refusal to obey his owner: “Marriage was a sacred
institution binding upon me.”
Cultural Changes. The closing of the Atlantic slave trade in
1808 and the rise of the Cotton Kingdom brought about great changes
among enslaved African Americans in the 1800s. Because slave
owners could not buy any more Africans they created an interregional
It has been painful to me…to recall the dreary years I passed
in bondage…. Yet… with those gloomy recollections come
tender memories of my good old grandmother, like light, fleecy
clouds floating over a dark and troubled sea…
Strengthened Religion. The religious beliefs African
Americans had developed in the 1700s grew stronger in the 1800s.
Now, almost all African American slaves adopted Christianity, but in a
form that included some of their African religious beliefs. They
continued to worship at “invisible churches.” Despite slave owners’
efforts to track them down with savage slave hounds,” the believers
refused to give up their meetings. They posted guards to listen for
barking dogs. Sometimes, they strung vines through the trees to trip
patrols. Other times, they deadened the voices of worshipers with
“hush harbors’ – shelters built out of tree branches.
As slaves were sold throughout the South, religious songs
known as spirituals spread from plantation to plantation. The
spirituals expressed a defiance toward slavery and a belief in equality,
even if only after death. The words of one spiritual led officials in
Georgetown, South Carolina, to lock up anyone who sang them. The
song declared:
And it won’t be long. And it won’t be long,
And it won’t be long, Poor sinner suffer here.
We’ll soon be free
De Lord will call us home.
………………………………………………………………………….
We’ll fight for liberty
When the Lord will call us home.
After reading the above pages, answer the following
questions in complete sentences on a separate piece of
paper:
1.What elements of African ways entered into the lives of the
colonists?
2. What was the connection between the Biblical story of the
Israelites and the feelings of African American slaves about their
condition? Why might Christian hymns with titles like “We Are
the People of God” have given enslaved Africans hope?
3. What event in 1793 changed life for African American slaves?
Why?
4. In what ways did Africans soften the cruelties of slave life?
5. Describe in a paragraph the life of a field hand.
6. List two ways in which African American slave life of the
1800s was different form that of the 1700s.
7. Why do you think slave owners tried to crush “Invisible
Churches”