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The Master-Slave Relationship
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To what extent did slaves maintain power in their own lives?
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Respond to the above question using your knowledge of the time period and the sources provided to support your arguments.
Primary source: Hewlett and Bright, "Sale of Valuable Slaves on Account of Departure," broadside, 1835.
Background information: A slaveowner advertises his slaves as valuable commodities, identifying each slave.
Hewlett and Bright, "Sale of Valuable Slaves on Account of Departure," broadside, New Orleans, 13 May 1835.
Courtesy of The New-York Historical Society, Bella C. Landauer Collection
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Primary source: Anthony Chase to Jeremiah Hoffman, letter, 1827.
Background information: In this letter, escaped slave Anthony Chase explains to his former master Jeremiah Hoffman why he has run away.
[Misspellings were preserved for historical accuracy]
August 8th, 1827
Sir
I know that you will be astonished and surprised when you becom acquainted with the unexspected course that I am now about to take, a step that I never had the most distant Idea of takeing, but what can a man do who has his hands bound and his feet fettered He will certainly try to get them loosened by fair and Honorable means and if not so he will ceartainly get them loosened in any way that he may think the most adviseable. I hope Sir that you will not think that I had any faoult to find of you or your family no sir I have none and I could of lived with you all the days of my life if my conditions could have been in any way bettered which I intreated with my mistress to do but it was all in vain She would not consent to any thing that would melorate my condition in any shape of measure So I shall go to sea in the first vessel that may ofer an opportunity and as soon as I can acumulate a sum of money suficent I will Remit it to my mistress to prove to her and to [the] world that I dont mean to be dishonest but wish to pay her every cent that I think my servaces is worth I have served her 11 years faithfully and think it hard that I offered $5.00 what I was valued at 4 years ago and also to pay 4 per cent until the whole sum was payed which I believe I could of done in 2 years and a half or 3 years at any rate but now as I have to Runaway like a crimnal I will pay her when I can...Though I am truly sorry that I must leave you in this situation that I do, but I will Recomend to you as a Servant Samuel Brown that I think a good & honest man and one that is acquainted well with his business but you can Refer to Mrs Snyder who is well acquainted with him and has lived in the hous with him. as my mistress is not in Town I [have] taken the Last months wages to defray my exspenses but that money and the five dollars that you lent me the day before I left you I shall ceartainly Return before I ship for the sea. I dont suppose that I shall ever be forgiven for this act but I hope to find forgiveness in that world that is to com. I dont take this step mearly because I wish to be free but because I want to do justice to myself and to others and also to procure a liveing for a family a thing that my mistress would not let me do though I humblely Requested her to let me do so
Before I was married I was Promised my freedom then after find this Peace of writeing whish you will find incloesed I was then confident that I was free at Mr Williams Death, and so I married. . . I must no beg your forgiveness and at the same time pray to god for your helth and happyness as well as that of your family
I am Sir your most Obedient Servt &c
Anthony Chase
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Anthony Chase to Jeremiah Hoffman, Chatsworth House [Baltimore], 8 August 1827, in Robert S. Starobin, ed., Blacks in Bondage: Letters of American Slaves, (New York: M. Weiner, 1988), 120.
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Primary source: Henry A. Tayloe to B.O. Tayloe, letter, 1835.
Background information: In this letter, Henry Tayloe, a slaveowner, reveals to his brother the interest of Southern slaveholders in the institution of slavery.
George and myself only made 30 bales and George about the same. I wish you may visit me early this Spring to make some arrangements about your Negroes. If they continue high I would advise you to sell them in this country on one and two years credit bearing 8 per ct interest. The present high price of Negroes can not continue long and if you will make me a partner in the sale on reasonable terms I will bring them out this Fall from VA and sell them for you and release you from all troubles. On a credit your negroes would bring here about $120 to $130,000 bearing 8 per ct interest. My object is to make a fortune here as soon as possible by industry and economy, and then return [to VA] to enjoy myself. Therefore I am willing to aid you in any way as far as reason will permit. You had better give your land away if you can get from $6 to $800 round for your Negroes —and if you will incur the risk with me, and allow me time to pay you, I will give a fair price for one half bring them to this country sell the whole number and divide the proceeds of the sale equally. It is better to sell on time as by so doing good masters may be obtained. . . I have rented land for your Negroes and Henry Key's, and shall attend to them faithfully. Gowie [?] ran off about the 18th of December and has not been heard of. I hope to hear of him in a few days that I may put him to work. He went off without any provocation. I expect he is a deceitful fellow.
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Henry A. Tayloe to B. O. Tayloe, 5 January 1835, Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery, Alabama, reproduced at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h3138t.html.
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Primary source: Lewis Clarke, Interesting Memoirs and Documents Relating to American Slavery . . . , memoir, 1846.
Background information: In his 1846 autobiographical account, Lewis Clarke, a former slave, answers questions about the manner in which he lived before he gained his freedom in 1841.
[Question] Are families often separated? How many such cases have you personally known?
[Answer from former slave, Lewis Clarke]
I never knew a whole family to live together till all were grown up in my life. There is almost always, in every family, some one or more keen and bright, or else sullen and stubborn slave, whose influence they are afraid of one the rest of the family, and such a one must take a walking ticket to the south. There are other causes of separation. The death of a large owner is the occasion usually of many families being broken up. Bankruptcy is another cause of separation, and the hard–heartedness of a majority of slave–holders another and a more fruitful cause than eitheror all the rest. Generally there is but little more scruple about separating families than there is with a man who keeps sheep in selling off the lambs in the fall. On one plantation where I lived, there was an old slave named Paris. He was from fifty to sixty years old, and a very honest and apparently pious slave. A slave–trader came along one day, to gather hands for the south. The old master ordered the waiter or coachman to take Paris into the back room pluck out all his gray hairs, rub his face with a greasy towel, and then had him brought forward and sold for a young man. His wife consented to go with him, upon a promise from the trader that they should be sold together, with their youngest child, which she carried in her arms. They left two behind them, who were only from four to six or eight years of age. The speculator collected his drove, started for the market, and, before he left the state, he sold that infant child to pay one of his tavern bills, and took the balance in cash. . .
[Question] Have you ever known a slave mother to kill her own children?
[Answer from former slave, Lewis Clarke]
There was a slave mother near where I lived, who took her child into the cellar and killed it. She did it to prevent being separated from her child. Another slave mother took her three children and threw them into a well, and then jumped in with them, and they were all drowned. Other instances I have frequently heard of. At the death of many and many a slave child, I have seen the two feelings struggling in the bosom of a mother—joy, that it was beyond the reach of the slave monsters, and the natural grief of a mother over her child. In the presence of the master, grief seems to predominate; when away from them, they rejoice that there is one whom the slave–killer will never torment.
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Lewis Clarke, Interesting Memoirs and Documents Relating to American Slavery, and the Glorious Struggle Now Making for Complete Emancipation (1846; reprint, Miami: Mnemosyne, 1969), at http://www.gliah.uh.edu/black_voices/voices_display.cfm?id=56.
Courtesy of The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.
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Primary source: Advertisement for Fugitive Slave, broadside, Maryland, nineteenth century.
Background information: This broadside promised a reward for the return of a fugitive slave.
Chicago Historical Society.
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Primary source: Shackles, c. 1850.
Background information: These iron leg shackles are typical of those used on Southern plantations in the mid-1800s to restrain slaves when they were being moved from one location to another and to punish slaves who attempted escape.
Copyright 2002 The Chicago Historical Society.
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Primary source: Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself, autobiography, 1845.
Background information: Frederick Douglass was an escaped slave who gained fame as an orator and a writer promoting the cause of abolition. He wrote the following testimonial to the demoralizing effects of slavery in his autobiography.
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[. . . ]
If at any one time of my life more than another, I was made to drink the bitterest dregs of slavery, that time was during the first six months of my stay with Mr. Covey. We were worked in all weathers. It was never too hot or too cold; it could never rain, blow, hail, or snow, too hard for us to work in the field. Work, work, work, was scarcely more the order of the day than of the night. The longest days were too short for him, and the shortest nights too long for him. I was somewhat unmanageable when I first went there, but a few months of this discipline tamed me. Mr. Covey succeeded in breaking me. I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute!
[. . . ]
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Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself, (Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1845); reprint, edited with an introduction by David W. Blight (Boston: Bedford Books, 1993), 74.
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Primary source: Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, The Dred Scott Decision, 1857.
Background information: The following excerpt is from the majority decision in the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford. Written by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, it addresses the question of African American citizenship and slavery in the territories.
[ . . . ]
Now . . . the right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution. The right to traffic in it, like an ordinary article of merchandise and property, was guaranteed to the citizens of the United States, in every state that might desire it, for twenty years. And the government in express terms is pledged to protect it in all future time, if the slave escapes from his owner. This is done in plain words—too plain to be misunderstood. And no word can be found in the Constitution which gives Congress a greater power over slave property . . . than property of any other description. The only power conferred is the power coupled with the duty of guarding and protecting the owner of his rights.
Upon these considerations, it is the opinion of the Court that the Act of Congress [Missouri Compromise] which prohibited a citizen from holding and owning property of this kind in the territory of the United States north of the line therein mentioned is not warranted by the Constitution, and is therefore void; and that neither Dred Scott himself, nor any of his family, were made free by being carried into this territory; even if they had been carried here by the owner with the intention of becoming a permanent resident.
Upon the whole, therefore, it is the judgment of this Court that it appears by the record before us that the plaintiff in error [Dred Scott] is not a citizen of Missouri in the sense in which that word is used in the Constitution; and that the Circuit Court of the United States for that reason had no jurisdiction in the case, and could give not judgment in it.
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Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1856). Full text of
the decision is at http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=60&invol=393.
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Primary source: Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, memoir, 1861.
Background information: Harriet A. Jacobs recounts the unique struggles of female slaves in her autobiography, which was later edited by the famous abolitionist, Lydia Maria Child.
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[. . . ]
Even the little child, who is accustomed to wait on her mistress and her children, will learn, before she is twelve years old, why it is that her mistress hates such and such a one among the slaves. Perhaps the child's own mother is among those hated ones. She listens to violent outbreaks of jealous passion, and cannot help understanding what is the cause. She will become prematurely knowing in evil things. Soon she will learn to tremble when she hears her master's footfall. She will be compelled to realize that she is no longer a child. If God has bestowed beauty upon her, it will prove her greatest curse. That which commands admiration in the white woman only hastens the degradation of the female slave.
[. . . ]
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Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, ed. L. Maria Child (Boston, 1861); reprint, edited and with an introduction by Jean Fagan Yellin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000) 28.
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Primary source: Harriet Jacobs, "The Trials of Girlhood," slave narrative, 1861.
Background information: The following excerpt is from the narrative of a former slave who lived on a small farm in Tennessee.
[. . . ]
Even the little child, who is accustomed to wait on her mistress and her children, will learn, before she is twelve years old, why it is that her mistress hates such and such a one among the [female] slaves. Perhaps the child's own mother is among those hated ones. She listens to violent outbreaks of jealous passion, and cannot help understanding what is the cause. She will become prematurely knowing in evil things. Soon she will learn to tremble when she hears her master's footfall. She will be compelled to realize that she is no longer a child. If God has bestowed beauty upon her, it will prove her greatest curse. That which commands admiration in the white woman only hastens the degradation of the female slave.
[. . . ]
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Harriet Jacobs, "The Trials of Girlhood," (1861) in Black Women in White America: A Documentary History, ed. Gerda Lerner (New York: Random House, 1973).
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Primary source: Mother Ann Clark, "But I Can Kill You," slave narrative, c. 1936.
Background information: Members of the New Deal’s Federal Writers’ Project interviewed former slaves during 1936–38. The misspellings respect the speech and regional dialect of the ex-slaves. Mother Ann Clark, born June 1, 1825, was a slave in Louisiana. She describes the ruthlessness of her master.
[ . . . ]
My papa was strong. He never had a licking in his life. He helped the master, but one day the master says, "Si, you got to have a whopping," and my papa says, "I never had a whopping and you can't whop me." And the master says, "But I can kill you," and he shot my papa down. My mama took him in the cabin and put him on a pallet. He died.
[ . . . ]
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Mother Ann Clark, "But I Can Kill You," in Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery (1945; reprint, ed. B. A. Botkin, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 55.
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Primary source: A. R. Waud, "Scenes on a Cotton Plantation," illustration, Harper's Weekly, 2 February 1867.
Background information: In this illustration, slaves are shown picking cotton while overseers watch from horseback.
A. R. Waud, "Scenes on a Cotton Plantation," illustration, Harper's Weekly, 40, no. 527 (2 February 1867), 72–3.
Courtesy of HarpWeek.
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