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Primary source: Lewis Clarke, Interesting Memoirs and Documents Relating to American Slavery . . . , memoir, 1846.
Caption: 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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