A SOCIAL HISTORY
OF THE
American Negro
BEING
A HISTORY OF THE NEGRO PROBLEM
IN THE UNITED STATES
INCLUDING
A HISTORY AND STUDY OF THE
REPUBLIC OF LIBERIA
by BENJAMIN BRAWLEY
1921
TO THE MEMORY OF
NORWOOD PENROSE HALLOWELL
PATRIOT
1839-1914
These all died in faith, not having received
the promises, but having seen them afar off.
Norwood Penrose Hallowell was born in Philadelphia April 13, 1839. He inherited the tradition of the Quakers and grew to manhood in a strong anti-slavery atmosphere. The home of his father, Morris L. Hallowell—the "House called Beautiful," in the phrase of Oliver Wendell Holmes—was a haven of rest and refreshment for wounded soldiers of the Union Army, and hither also, after the assault upon him in the Senate, Charles Sumner had come for succor and peace. Three brothers in one way or another served the cause of the Union, one of them, Edward N. Hallowell, succeeding Robert Gould Shaw in the Command of the Fifty-Fourth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteers. Norwood Penrose Hallowell himself, a natural leader of men, was Harvard class orator in 1861; twenty-five years later he was the marshal of his class; and in 1896 he delivered the Memorial Day address in Sanders Theater. Entering the Union Army with promptness in April, 1861, he served first in the New England Guards, then as First Lieutenant in the Twentieth Massachusetts, won a Captain's commission in November, and within the next year took part in numerous engagements, being wounded at Glendale and even more severely at Antietam. On April 17, 1863, he became Lieutenant-Colonel of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts, and on May 30 Colonel of the newly organized Fifty-Fifth. Serving in the investment of Fort Wagner, he was one of the first to enter the fort after its evacuation. His wounds ultimately forced him to resign his commission, and in November, 1863, he retired from the service. He engaged in business in New York, but after a few years removed to Boston, where he became eminent for his public spirit. He was one of God's noblemen, and to the last he preserved his faith in the Negro whom he had been among the first to lead toward the full heritage of American citizenship. He died April 11, 1914.
CONTENTS
[CHAPTER I]
THE COMING OF NEGROES TO AMERICA
[CHAPTER II]
THE NEGRO IN THE COLONIES
[CHAPTER III]
THE REVOLUTIONARY ERA
[CHAPTER IV]
THE NEW WEST, THE SOUTH, AND THE WEST INDIES
[CHAPTER V]
INDIAN AND NEGRO
[CHAPTER VI]
EARLY APPROACH TO THE NEGRO PROBLEM
[CHAPTER VII]
THE NEGRO REPLY—I: REVOLT
[CHAPTER VIII]
THE NEGRO REPLY—II: ORGANIZATION AND AGITATION
[CHAPTER IX]
LIBERIA
[CHAPTER X]
THE NEGRO A NATIONAL ISSUE
[CHAPTER XI]
SOCIAL PROGRESS, 1820-1860
[CHAPTER XII]
THE CIVIL WAR AND EMANCIPATION
[CHAPTER XIII]
THE ERA OF ENFRANCHISEMENT
[CHAPTER XIV]
THE NEGRO IN THE NEW SOUTH
[CHAPTER XV]
"THE VALE OF TEARS," 1890-1910
[CHAPTER XVI]
THE NEGRO IN THE NEW AGE
[CHAPTER XVII]
THE NEGRO PROBLEM
PREFACE
In the following pages an effort is made to give fresh treatment to the history of the Negro people in the United States, and to present this from a distinct point of view, the social. It is now forty years since George W. Williams completed his History of the Negro Race in America, and while there have been many brilliant studies of periods or episodes since that important work appeared, no one book has again attempted to treat the subject comprehensively, and meanwhile the race has passed through some of its most critical years in America. The more outstanding political phases of the subject, especially in the period before the Civil War, have been frequently considered; and in any account of the Negro people themselves the emphasis has almost always been upon political and military features. Williams emphasizes this point of view, and his study of legal aspects is not likely soon to be superseded. A noteworthy point about the history of the Negro, however, is that laws on the statute-books have not necessarily been regarded, public opinion and sentiment almost always insisting on being considered. It is necessary accordingly to study the actual life of the Negro people in itself and in connection with that of the nation, and something like this the present work endeavors to do. It thus becomes not only a Social History of the race, but also the first formal effort toward a History of the Negro Problem in America.
With this aim in mind, in view of the enormous amount of material, we have found it necessary to confine ourselves within very definite limits. A thorough study of all the questions relating to the Negro in the United States would fill volumes, for sooner or later it would touch upon all the great problems of American life. No attempt is made to perform such a task; rather is it intended to fix attention upon the race itself as definitely as possible. Even with this limitation there are some topics that might be treated at length, but that have already been studied so thoroughly that no very great modification is now likely to be made of the results obtained. Such are many of the questions revolving around the general subject of slavery. Wars are studied not so much to take note of the achievement of Negro soldiers, vital as that is, as to record the effect of these events on the life of the great body of people. Both wars and slavery thus become not more than incidents in the history of the ultimate problem.
In view of what has been said, it is natural that the method of treatment should vary with the different chapters. Sometimes it is general, as when we touch upon the highways of American history. Sometimes it is intensive, as in the consideration of insurrections and early effort for social progress; and Liberia, as a distinct and much criticized experiment in government by American Negroes, receives very special attention. For the first time also an effort is now made to treat consecutively the life of the Negro people in America for the last fifty years.
This work is the result of studies on which I have been engaged for a number of years and which have already seen some light in A Short History of the American Negro and The Negro in Literature and Art; and acquaintance with the elementary facts contained in such books as these is in the present work very largely taken for granted. I feel under a special debt of gratitude to the New York State Colonization Society, which, coöperating with the American Colonization Society and the Board of Trustees of Donations for Education in Liberia, in 1920 gave me opportunity for some study at first hand of educational and social conditions on the West Coast of Africa; and most of all do I remember the courtesy and helpfulness of Dr. E.C. Sage and Dr. J.H. Dillard in this connection. In general I have worked independently of Williams, but any student of the subject must be grateful to that pioneer, as well as to Dr. W.E.B. DuBois, who has made contributions in so many ways. My obligations to such scholarly dissertations as those by Turner and Russell are manifest, while to Mary Stoughton Locke's Anti-Slavery in America—a model monograph—I feel indebted more than to any other thesis. Within the last few years, of course, the Crisis, the Journal of Negro History, and the Negro Year-Book have in their special fields become indispensable, and to Dr. Carter G. Woodson and Professor M.N. Work much credit is due for the faith which has prompted their respective ventures. I take this occasion also to thank Professor W.E. Dodd, of the University of Chicago, who from the time of my entrance upon this field has generously placed at my disposal his unrivaled knowledge of the history of the South; and as always I must be grateful to my father, Rev. E.M. Brawley, for that stimulation and criticism which all my life have been most valuable to me. Finally, the work has been dedicated to the memory of a distinguished soldier, who, in his youth, in the nation's darkest hour, helped to lead a struggling people to freedom and his country to victory. It is now submitted to the consideration of all who are interested in the nation's problems, and indeed in any effort that tries to keep in mind the highest welfare of the country itself.
BENJAMIN BRAWLEY. Cambridge, January 1, 1921.
SOCIAL HISTORY OF THE
AMERICAN NEGRO
[CHAPTER I]
THE COMING OF NEGROES TO AMERICA
1. [African Origins]
An outstanding characteristic of recent years has been an increasing recognition of the cultural importance of Africa to the world. From all that has been written three facts are prominent: (1) That at some time early in the Middle Ages, perhaps about the seventh century, there was a considerable infiltration of Arabian culture into the tribes living below the Sahara, something of which may to-day most easily be seen among such people as the Haussas in the Soudan and the Mandingoes along the West Coast; (2) That, whatever influences came in from the outside, there developed in Africa an independent culture which must not be underestimated; and (3) That, perhaps vastly more than has been supposed, this African culture had to do with early exploration and colonization in America. The first of these three facts is very important, but is now generally accepted and need not here detain us. For the present purpose the second and third demand more attention.
The development of native African art is a theme of never-ending fascination for the ethnologist. Especially have striking resemblances between Negro and Oceanian culture been pointed out. In political organization as well as certain forms of artistic endeavor the Negro people have achieved creditable results, and especially have they been honored as the originators of the iron technique.[1] It has further been shown that fetichism, which is especially well developed along the West Coast and its hinterland, is at heart not very different from the manitou beliefs of the American Indians; and it is this connection that furnishes the key to some of the most striking results of the researches of the latest and most profound student of this and related problems.[2]
From the Soudan radiated a culture that was destined to affect Europe and in course of time to extend its influence even beyond the Atlantic Ocean. It is important to remember that throughout the early history of Europe and up to the close of the fifteenth century the approach to the home of the Negro was by land. The Soudan was thought to be the edge of the then known world; Homer speaks of the Ethiopians as "the farthest removed of men, and separated into two divisions." Later Greek writers carry the description still further and speak of the two divisions as Eastern and Western—the Eastern occupying the countries eastward of the Nile, and the Western stretching from the western shores of that river to the Atlantic Coast. "One of these divisions," says Lady Lugard, "we have to acknowledge, was perhaps itself the original source of the civilization which has through Egypt permeated the Western world.... When the history of Negroland comes to be written in detail, it may be found that the kingdoms lying toward the eastern end of the Soudan were the home of races who inspired, rather than of races who received, the traditions of civilization associated for us with the name of ancient Egypt."[3]
If now we come to America, we find the Negro influence upon the Indian to be so strong as to call in question all current conceptions of American archæology and so early as to suggest the coming of men from the Guinea Coast perhaps even before the coming of Columbus.[4] The first natives of Africa to come were Mandingoes; many of the words used by the Indians in their daily life appear to be not more than corruptions or adaptations of words used by the tribes of Africa; and the more we study the remains of those who lived in America before 1492, and the far-reaching influence of African products and habits, the more must we acknowledge the strength of the position of the latest thesis. This whole subject will doubtless receive much more attention from scholars, but in any case it is evident that the demands of Negro culture can no longer be lightly regarded or brushed aside, and that as a scholarly contribution to the subject Wiener's work is of the very highest importance.
2. [The Negro in Spanish Exploration]
When we come to Columbus himself, the accuracy of whose accounts has so recently been questioned, we find a Negro, Pedro Alonso Niño, as the pilot of one of the famous three vessels. In 1496 Niño sailed to Santo Domingo and he was also with Columbus on his third voyage. With two men, Cristóbal de la Guerra, who served as pilot, and Luís de la Guerra, a Spanish merchant, in 1499 he planned what proved to be the first successful commercial voyage to the New World.
The revival of slavery at the close of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the system of Negro slavery were due to the commercial expansion of Portugal in the fifteenth century. The very word Negro is the modern Spanish and Portuguese form of the Latin niger. In 1441 Prince Henry sent out one Gonzales, who captured three Moors on the African coast. These men offered as ransom ten Negroes whom they had taken. The Negroes were taken to Lisbon in 1442, and in 1444 Prince Henry regularly began the European trade from the Guinea Coast. For fifty years his country enjoyed a monopoly of the traffic. By 1474 Negroes were numerous in Spain, and special interest attaches to Juan de Valladolid, probably the first of many Negroes who in time came to have influence and power over their people under the authority of a greater state. He was addressed as "judge of all the Negroes and mulattoes, free or slaves, which are in the very loyal and noble city of Seville, and throughout the whole archbishopric thereof." After 1500 there are frequent references to Negroes, especially in the Spanish West Indies. Instructions to Ovando, governor of Hispaniola, in 1501, prohibited the passage to the Indies of Jews, Moors, or recent converts, but authorized him to take over Negro slaves who had been born in the power of Christians. These orders were actually put in force the next year. Even the restricted importation Ovando found inadvisable, and he very soon requested that Negroes be not sent, as they ran away to the Indians, with whom they soon made friends. Isabella accordingly withdrew her permission, but after her death Ferdinand reverted to the old plan and in 1505 sent to Ovando seventeen Negro slaves for work in the copper-mines, where the severity of the labor was rapidly destroying the Indians. In 1510 Ferdinand directed that fifty Negroes be sent immediately, and that more be sent later; and in April of this year over a hundred were bought in the Lisbon market. This, says Bourne,[5] was the real beginning of the African slave-trade to America. Already, however, as early as 1504, a considerable number of Negroes had been introduced from Guinea because, as we are informed, "the work of one Negro was worth more than that of four Indians." In 1513 thirty Negroes assisted Balboa in building the first ships made on the Pacific Coast of America. In 1517 Spain formally entered upon the traffic, Charles V on his accession to the throne granting "license for the introduction of Negroes to the number of four hundred," and thereafter importation to the West Indies became a thriving industry. Those who came in these early years were sometimes men of considerable intelligence, having been trained as Mohammedans or Catholics. By 1518 Negroes were at work in the sugar-mills in Hispaniola, where they seem to have suffered from indulgence in drinks made from sugarcane. In 1521 it was ordered that Negro slaves should not be employed on errands as in general these tended to cultivate too close acquaintance with the Indians. In 1522 there was a rebellion on the sugar plantations in Hispaniola, primarily because the services of certain Indians were discontinued. Twenty Negroes from the Admiral's mill, uniting with twenty others who spoke the same language, killed a number of Christians. They fled and nine leagues away they killed another Spaniard and sacked a house. One Negro, assisted by twelve Indian slaves, also killed nine other Christians. After much trouble the Negroes were apprehended and several of them hanged. It was about 1526 that Negroes were first introduced within the present limits of the United States, being brought to a colony near what later became Jamestown, Va. Here the Negroes were harshly treated and in course of time they rose against their oppressors and fired their houses. The settlement was broken up, and the Negroes and their Spanish companions returned to Hispaniola, whence they had come. In 1540, in Quivira, in Mexico, there was a Negro who had taken holy orders; and in 1542 there were established at Guamanga three brotherhoods of the True Cross of Spaniards, one being for Indians and one for Negroes.
The outstanding instance of a Negro's heading in exploration is that of Estévanico (or Estévanillo, or Estévan, that is, Stephen), one of the four survivors of the ill-fated expedition of De Narvaez, who sailed from Spain, June 17, 1527. Having returned to Spain after many years of service in the New World, Pamfilo de Narvaez petitioned for a grant, and accordingly the right to conquer and colonize the country between the Rio de las Palmas, in eastern Mexico, and Florida was accorded him.[6] His force originally consisted of six hundred soldiers and colonists. The whole conduct of the expedition—incompetent in the extreme—furnished one of the most appalling tragedies of early exploration in America. The original number of men was reduced by half by storms and hurricanes and desertions in Santo Domingo and Cuba, and those who were left landed in April, 1528, near the entrance to Tampa Bay, on the west coast of Florida. One disaster followed another in the vicinity of Pensacola Bay and the mouth of the Mississippi until at length only four men survived. These were Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca; Andrés Dorantes de Carranza, a captain of infantry; Alonzo del Castillo Maldonado; and Estévanico, who had originally come from the west coast of Morocco and who was a slave of Dorantes. These men had most remarkable adventures in the years between 1528 and 1536, and as a narrative of suffering and privation Cabeza de Vaca's Journal has hardly an equal in the annals of the continent. Both Dorantes and Estévanico were captured, and indeed for a season or two all four men were forced to sojourn among the Indians. They treated the sick, and with such success did they work that their fame spread far and wide among the tribes. Crowds followed them from place to place, showering presents upon them. With Alonzo de Castillo, Estévanico sojourned for a while with the Yguazes, a very savage tribe that killed its own male children and bought those of strangers. He at length escaped from these people and spent several months with the Avavares. He afterwards went with De Vaca to the Maliacones, only a short distance from the Avavares, and still later he accompanied Alonzo de Castillo in exploring the country toward the Rio Grande. He was unexcelled as a guide who could make his way through new territory. In 1539 he went with Fray Marcos of Nice, the Father Provincial of the Franciscan order in New Spain, as a guide to the Seven Cities of Cibola, the villages of the ancestors of the present Zuñi Indians in western New Mexico. Preceding Fray Marcos by a few days and accompanied by natives who joined him on the way, he reached Háwikuh, the southern-most of the seven towns. Here he and all but three of his Indian followers were killed.
3. [Development of the Slave-Trade]
Portugal and Spain having demonstrated that the slave-trade was profitable, England also determined to engage in the traffic; and as early as 1530 William Hawkins, a merchant of Plymouth, visited the Guinea Coast and took away a few slaves. England really entered the field, however, with the voyage in 1562 of Captain John Hawkins, son of William, who in October of this year also went to the coast of Guinea. He had a fleet of three ships and one hundred men, and partly by the sword and partly by other means he took three hundred or more Negroes, whom he took to Santo Domingo and sold profitably.[7] He was richly laden going homeward and some of his stores were seized by Spanish vessels. Hawkins made two other voyages, one in 1564, and another, with Drake, in 1567. On his second voyage he had four armed ships, the largest being the Jesus, a vessel of seven hundred tons, and a force of one hundred and seventy men. December and January (1564-5) he spent in picking up freight, and by sickness and fights with the Negroes he lost many of his men. Then at the end of January he set out for the West Indies. He was becalmed for twenty-one days, but he arrived at the Island of Dominica March 9. He traded along the Spanish coasts and on his return to England he touched at various points in the West Indies and sailed along the coast of Florida. On his third voyage he had five ships. He himself was again in command of the Jesus, while Drake was in charge of the Judith, a little vessel of fifty tons. He got together between four and five hundred Negroes and again went to Dominica. He had various adventures and at last was thrown by a storm on the coast of Mexico. Here after three days he was attacked by a Spanish fleet of twelve vessels, and all of his ships were destroyed except the Judith and another small vessel, the Minion, which was so crowded that one hundred men risked the dangers on land rather than go to sea with her. On this last voyage Hawkins and Drake had among their companions the Earls of Pembroke and Leicester, who were then, like other young Elizabethans, seeking fame and fortune. It is noteworthy that in all that he did Hawkins seems to have had no sense of cruelty or wrong. He held religious services morning and evening, and in the spirit of the later Cromwell he enjoined upon his men to "serve God daily, love one another, preserve their victuals, beware of fire, and keep good company." Queen Elizabeth evidently regarded the opening of the slave-trade as a worthy achievement, for after his second voyage she made Hawkins a knight, giving him for a crest the device of a Negro's head and bust with the arms securely bound.
France joined in the traffic in 1624, and then Holland and Denmark, and the rivalry soon became intense. England, with her usual aggressiveness, assumed a commanding position, and, much more than has commonly been supposed, the Navigation Ordinance of 1651 and the two wars with the Dutch in the seventeenth century had as their basis the struggle for supremacy in the slave-trade. The English trade proper began with the granting of rights to special companies, to one in 1618, to another in 1631, and in 1662 to the "Company of Royal Adventurers," rechartered in 1672 as the "Royal African Company," to which in 1687 was given the exclusive right to trade between the Gold Coast and the British colonies in America. James, Duke of York, was interested in this last company, and it agreed to supply the West Indies with three thousand slaves annually. In 1698, on account of the incessant clamor of English merchants, the trade was opened generally, and any vessel carrying the British flag was by act of Parliament permitted to engage in it on payment of a duty of 10 per cent on English goods exported to Africa. New England immediately engaged in the traffic, and vessels from Boston and Newport went forth to the Gold Coast laden with hogsheads of rum. In course of time there developed a three-cornered trade by which molasses was brought from the West Indies to New England, made into rum to be taken to Africa and exchanged for slaves, the slaves in turn being brought to the West Indies or the Southern colonies.[8] A slave purchased for one hundred gallons of rum worth £10 brought from £20 to £50 when offered for sale in America.[9] Newport soon had twenty-two still houses, and even these could not satisfy the demand. England regarded the slave-trade as of such importance that when in 1713 she accepted the Peace of Utrecht she insisted on having awarded to her for thirty years the exclusive right to transport slaves to the Spanish colonies in America. When in the course of the eighteenth century the trade became fully developed, scores of vessels went forth each year to engage in it; but just how many slaves were brought to the present United States and how many were taken to the West Indies or South America, it is impossible to say. In 1726 the three cities of London, Bristol, and Liverpool alone had 171 ships engaged in the traffic, and the profits were said to warrant a thousand more, though such a number was probably never reached so far as England alone was concerned.[10]
4. [Planting of Slavery in the Colonies]
It is only for Virginia that we can state with definiteness the year in which Negro slaves were first brought to an English colony on the mainland. When legislation on the subject of slavery first appears elsewhere, slaves are already present. "About the last of August (1619)," says John Rolfe in John Smith's Generall Historie, "came in a Dutch man of warre, that sold us twenty Negars." These Negroes were sold into servitude, and Virginia did not give statutory recognition to slavery as a system until 1661, the importations being too small to make the matter one of importance. In this year, however, an act of assembly stated that Negroes were "incapable of making satisfaction for the time lost in running away by addition of time"; [11] and thus slavery gained a firm place in the oldest of the colonies.
Negroes were first imported into Massachusetts from Barbadoes a year or two before 1638, but in John Winthrop's Journal, under date February 26 of this year, we have positive evidence on the subject as follows: "Mr. Pierce in the Salem ship, the Desire, returned from the West Indies after seven months. He had been at Providence, and brought some cotton, and tobacco, and Negroes, etc., from thence, and salt from Tertugos. Dry fish and strong liquors are the only commodities for those parts. He met there two men-of-war, sent forth by the lords, etc., of Providence with letters of mart, who had taken divers prizes from the Spaniard and many Negroes." It was in 1641 that there was passed in Massachusetts the first act on the subject of slavery, and this was the first positive statement in any of the colonies with reference to the matter. Said this act: "There shall never be any bond slavery, villeinage, nor captivity among us, unless it be lawful captives, taken in just wars, and such strangers as willingly sell themselves or are sold to us, and these shall have all the liberties and Christian usages which the law of God established in Israel requires." This article clearly sanctioned slavery. Of the three classes of persons referred to, the first was made up of Indians, the second of white people under the system of indenture, and the third of Negroes. In this whole matter, as in many others, Massachusetts moved in advance of the other colonies. The first definitely to legalize slavery, in course of time she became also the foremost representative of sentiment against the system. In 1646 one John Smith brought home two Negroes from the Guinea Coast, where we are told he "had been the means of killing near a hundred more." The General Court, "conceiving themselves bound by the first opportunity to bear witness against the heinous and crying sin of man-stealing," ordered that the Negroes be sent at public expense to their native country.[12] In later cases, however, Massachusetts did not find herself able to follow this precedent. In general in these early years New England was more concerned about Indians than about Negroes, as the presence of the former in large numbers was a constant menace, while Negro slavery had not yet assumed its most serious aspects.
In New York slavery began under the Dutch rule and continued under the English. Before or about 1650 the Dutch West India Company brought some Negroes to New Netherland. Most of these continued to belong to the company, though after a period of labor (under the common system of indenture) some of the more trusty were permitted to have small farms, from the produce of which they made return to the company. Their children, however, continued to be slaves. In 1664 New Netherland became New York. The next year, in the code of English laws that was drawn up, it was enacted that "no Christian shall be kept in bond slavery, villeinage, or captivity, except who shall be judged thereunto by authority, or such as willingly have sold or shall sell themselves." As at first there was some hesitancy about making Negroes Christians, this act, like the one in Massachusetts, by implication permitted slavery.
It was in 1632 that the grant including what is now the states of Maryland and Delaware was made to George Calvert, first Lord Baltimore. Though slaves are mentioned earlier, it was in 1663-4 that the Maryland Legislature passed its first enactment on the subject of slavery. It was declared that "all Negroes and other slaves within this province, and all Negroes and other slaves to be hereinafter imported into this province, shall serve during life; and all children born of any Negro or other slave, shall be slaves as their fathers were, for the term of their lives."
In Delaware and New Jersey the real beginnings of slavery are unusually hazy. The Dutch introduced the system in both of these colonies. In the laws of New Jersey the word slaves occurs as early as 1664, and acts for the regulation of the conduct of those in bondage began with the practical union of the colony with New York in 1702. The lot of the slave was somewhat better here than in most of the colonies. Although the system was in existence in Delaware almost from the beginning of the colony, it did not receive legal recognition until 1721, when there was passed an act providing for the trial of slaves in a special court with two justices and six freeholders.
As early as 1639 there are incidental reference to Negroes in Pennsylvania, and there are frequent references after this date.[13] In this colony there were strong objections to the importing of Negroes in spite of the demand for them. Penn in his charter to the Free Society of Traders in 1682 enjoined upon the members of this company that if they held black slaves these should be free at the end of fourteen years, the Negroes then to become the company's tenants.[14] In 1688 there originated in Germantown a protest against Negro slavery that was "the first formal action ever taken against the barter in human flesh within the boundaries of the United States." [15] Here a small company of Germans was assembled April 18, 1688, and there was drawn up a document signed by Garret Hendericks, Franz Daniel Pastorius, Dirck Op den Graeff, and Abraham Op den Graeff. The protest was addressed to the monthly meeting of the Quakers about to take place in Lower Dublin. The monthly meeting on April 30 felt that it could not pretend to take action on such an important matter and referred it to the quarterly meeting in June. This in turn passed it on to the yearly meeting, the highest tribunal of the Quakers. Here it was laid on the table, and for the next few years nothing resulted from it. About 1696, however, opposition to slavery on the part of the Quakers began to be active. In the colony at large before 1700 the lot of the Negro was regularly one of servitude. Laws were made for servants, white or black, and regulations and restrictions were largely identical. In 1700, however, legislation began more definitely to fix the status of the slave. In this year an act of the legislature forbade the selling of Negroes out of the province without their consent, but in other ways it denied the personality of the slave. This act met further formal approval in 1705, when special courts were ordained for the trial and punishment of slaves, and when importation from Carolina was forbidden on the ground that it made trouble with the Indians nearer home. In 1700 a maximum duty of 20s. was placed on each Negro imported, and in 1705 this was doubled, there being already some competition with white labor. In 1712 the Assembly sought to prevent importation altogether by a duty of £20 a head. This act was repealed in England, and a duty of £5 in 1715 was also repealed. In 1729, however, the duty was fixed at £2, at which figure it remained for a generation.
It was almost by accident that slavery was officially recognized in Connecticut in 1650. The code of laws compiled for the colony in this year was especially harsh on the Indians. It was enacted that certain of them who incurred the displeasure of the colony might be made to serve the person injured or "be shipped out and exchanged for Negroes." In 1680 the governor of the colony informed the Board of Trade that "as for blacks there came sometimes three or four in a year from Barbadoes, and they are usually sold at the rate of £22 apiece." These people were regarded rather as servants than as slaves, and early legislation was mainly in the line of police regulations designed to prevent their running away.
In 1652 it was enacted in Rhode Island that all slaves brought into the colony should be set free after ten years of service. This law was not designed, as might be supposed, to restrict slavery. It was really a step in the evolution of the system, and the limit of ten years was by no means observed. "The only legal recognition of the law was in the series of acts beginning January 4, 1703, to control the wandering of African slaves and servants, and another beginning in April, 1708, in which the slave-trade was indirectly legalized by being taxed."[16] "In course of time Rhode Island became the greatest slave-trader in the country, becoming a sort of clearing-house for the other colonies."[17]
New Hampshire, profiting by the experience of the neighboring colony of Massachusetts, deemed it best from the beginning to discourage slavery. There were so few Negroes in the colony as to form a quantity practically negligible. The system was recognized, however, an act being passed in 1714 to regulate the conduct of slaves, and another four years later to regulate that of masters.
In North Carolina, even more than in most of the colonies, the system of Negro slavery was long controlled by custom rather than by legal enactment. It was recognized by law in 1715, however, and police regulations to govern the slaves were enacted. In South Carolina the history of slavery is particularly noteworthy. The natural resources of this colony offered a ready home for the system, and the laws here formulated were as explicit as any ever enacted. Slaves were first imported from Barbadoes, and their status received official confirmation in 1682. By 1720 the number had increased to 12,000, the white people numbering only 9,000. By 1698 such was the fear from the preponderance of the Negro population that a special act was passed to encourage white immigration. Legislation "for the better ordering of slaves" was passed in 1690, and in 1712 the first regular slave law was enacted. Once before 1713, the year of the Assiento Contract of the Peace of Utrecht, and several times after this date, prohibitive duties were placed on Negroes to guard against their too rapid increase. By 1734, however, importation had again reached large proportions; and in 1740, in consequence of recent insurrectionary efforts, a prohibitive duty several times larger than the previous one was placed upon Negroes brought into the province.
The colony of Georgia was chartered in 1732 and actually founded the next year. Oglethorpe's idea was that the colony should be a refuge for persecuted Christians and the debtor classes of England. Slavery was forbidden on the ground that Georgia was to defend the other English colonies from the Spaniards on the South, and that it would not be able to do this if like South Carolina it dissipated its energies in guarding Negro slaves. For years the development of Georgia was slow, and the prosperous condition of South Carolina constantly suggested to the planters that "the one thing needful" for their highest welfare was slavery. Again and again were petitions addressed to the trustees, George Whitefield being among those who most urgently advocated the innovation. Moreover, Negroes from South Carolina were sometimes hired for life, and purchases were openly made in Savannah. It was not until 1749, however, that the trustees yielded to the request. In 1755 the legislature passed an act that regulated the conduct of the slaves, and in 1765 a more regular code was adopted. Thus did slavery finally gain a foothold in what was destined to become one of the most important of the Southern states.
For the first fifty or sixty years of the life of the colonies the introduction of Negroes was slow; the system of white servitude furnished most of the labor needed, and England had not yet won supremacy in the slave-trade. It was in the last quarter of the seventeenth century that importations began to be large, and in the course of the eighteenth century the numbers grew by leaps and bounds. In 1625, six years after the first Negroes were brought to the colony, there were in Virginia only 23 Negroes, 12 male, 11 female. [18] In 1659 there were 300; but in 1683 there were 3,000 and in 1708, 12,000. In 1680 Governor Simon Bradstreet reported to England with reference to Massachusetts that "no company of blacks or slaves" had been brought into the province since its beginning, for the space of fifty years, with the exception of a small vessel that two years previously, after a twenty months' voyage to Madagascar, had brought hither between forty and fifty Negroes, mainly women and children, who were sold for £10, £15, and £20 apiece; occasionally two or three Negroes were brought from Barbadoes or other islands, and altogether there were in Massachusetts at the time not more than 100 or 120.
The colonists were at first largely opposed to the introduction of slavery, and numerous acts were passed prohibiting it in Virginia, Massachusetts, and elsewhere; and in Georgia, as we have seen, it had at first been expressly forbidden. English business men, however, had no scruples about the matter. About 1663 a British Committee on Foreign Plantations declared that "black slaves are the most useful appurtenances of a plantation," [19] and twenty years later the Lords Commissioners of Trade stated that "the colonists could not possibly subsist" without an adequate supply of slaves. Laws passed in the colonies were regularly disallowed by the crown, and royal governors were warned that the colonists would not be permitted to "discourage a traffic so beneficial to the nation." Before 1772 Virginia passed not less than thirty-three acts looking toward the prohibition of the importation of slaves, but in every instance the act was annulled by England. In the far South, especially in South Carolina, we have seen that there were increasingly heavy duties. In spite of all such efforts for restriction, however, the system of Negro slavery, once well started, developed apace.
In two colonies not among the original thirteen but important in the later history of the United States, Negroes were present at a very early date, in the Spanish colony of Florida from the very first, and in the French colony of Louisiana as soon as New Orleans really began to grow. Negroes accompanied the Spaniards in their voyages along the South Atlantic coast early in the sixteenth century, and specially trained Spanish slaves assisted in the founding of St. Augustine in 1565. The ambitious schemes in France of the great adventurer, John Law, and especially the design of the Mississippi Company (chartered 1717) included an agreement for the importation into Louisiana of six thousand white persons and three thousand Negroes, the Company having secured among other privileges the exclusive right to trade with the colony for twenty-five years and the absolute ownership of all mines in it. The sufferings of some of the white emigrants from France—the kidnapping, the revenge, and the chicanery that played so large a part—all make a story complete in itself. As for the Negroes, it was definitely stipulated that these should not come from another French colony without the consent of the governor of that colony. The contract had only begun to be carried out when Law's bubble burst. However, in June, 1721, there were 600 Negroes in Louisiana; in 1745 the number had increased to 2020. The stories connected with these people are as tragic and wildly romantic as are most of the stories in the history of Louisiana. In fact, this colony from the very first owed not a little of its abandon and its fascination to the mysticism that the Negroes themselves brought from Africa. In the midst of much that is apocryphal one or two events or episodes stand out with distinctness. In 1729, Perier, governor at the time, testified with reference to a small company of Negroes who had been sent against the Indians as follows: "Fifteen Negroes in whose hands we had put weapons, performed prodigies of valor. If the blacks did not cost so much, and if their labors were not so necessary to the colony, it would be better to turn them into soldiers, and to dismiss those we have, who are so bad and so cowardly that they seem to have been manufactured purposely for this colony[20]." Not always, however, did the Negroes fight against the Indians. In 1730 some representatives of the powerful Banbaras had an understanding with the Chickasaws by which the latter were to help them in exterminating all the white people and in setting up an independent republic[21]. They were led by a strong and desperate Negro named Samba. As a result of this effort for freedom Samba and seven of his companions were broken on the wheel and a woman was hanged. Already, however, there had been given the suggestion of the possible alliance in the future of the Indian and the Negro. From the very first also, because of the freedom from restraint of all the elements of population that entered into the life of the colony, there was the beginning of that mixture of the races which was later to tell so vitally on the social life of Louisiana and whose effects are so readily apparent even to-day.
5. [The Wake of the Slave-Ship]
Thus it was that Negroes came to America. Thus it was also, we might say, that the Negro Problem came, though it was not for decades, not until the budding years of American nationality, that the ultimate reaches of the problem were realized. Those who came were by no means all of exactly the same race stock and language. Plantations frequently exhibited a variety of customs, and sometimes traditional enemies became brothers in servitude. The center of the colonial slave-trade was the African coast for about two hundred miles east of the great Niger River. From this comparatively small region came as many slaves as from all the rest of Africa together. A number of those who came were of entirely different race stock from the Negroes; some were Moors, and a very few were Malays from Madagascar.
The actual procuring of the slaves was by no means as easy a process as is sometimes supposed. In general the slave mart brought out the most vicious passions of all who were in any way connected with the traffic. The captain of a vessel had to resort to various expedients to get his cargo. His commonest method was to bring with him a variety of gay cloth, cheap ornaments, and whiskey, which he would give in exchange for slaves brought to him. His task was most simple when a chieftain of one tribe brought to him several hundred prisoners of war. Ordinarily, however, the work was more toilsome, and kidnapping a favorite method, though individuals were sometimes enticed on vessels. The work was always dangerous, for the natives along the slave-coast soon became suspicious. After they had seen some of their tribesmen taken away, they learned not to go unarmed while a slave-vessel was on the coast, and very often there were hand-to-hand encounters. It was not long before it began to be impressed upon those interested in the trade that it was not good business to place upon the captain of a vessel the responsibility of getting together three or four hundred slaves, and that it would be better if he could find his cargo waiting for him when he came. Thus arose the so-called factories, which were nothing more than warehouses. Along the coast were placed small settlements of Europeans, whose business it was to stimulate slave-hunting expeditions, negotiate for slaves brought in, and see that they were kept until the arrival of the ships. Practically every nation engaged in the traffic planted factories of this kind along the West Coast from Cape Verde to the equator; and thus it was that this part of Africa began to be the most flagrantly exploited region in the world; thus whiskey and all the other vices of civilization began to come to a simple and home-loving people.
Once on board the slaves were put in chains two by two. When the ship was ready to start, the hold of the vessel was crowded with moody and unhappy wretches who most often were made to crouch so that their knees touched their chins, but who also were frequently made to lie on their sides "spoon-fashion." Sometimes the space between floor and ceiling was still further diminished by the water-barrels; on the top of these barrels boards were placed, on the boards the slaves had to lie, and in the little space that remained they had to subsist as well as they could. There was generally only one entrance to the hold, and provision for only the smallest amount of air through the gratings on the sides. The clothing of a captive, if there was any at all, consisted of only a rag about the loins. The food was half-rotten rice, yams, beans, or soup, and sometimes bread and meat; the cooking was not good, nor was any care taken to see that all were fed. Water was always limited, a pint a day being a generous allowance; frequently no more than a gill could be had. The rule was to bring the slaves from the hold twice a day for an airing, about eight o'clock in the morning and four in the afternoon; but this plan was not always followed. On deck they were made to dance by the lash, and they were also forced to sing. Thus were born the sorrow-songs, the last cry of those who saw their homeland vanish behind them—forever.
Sometimes there were stern fights on board. Sometimes food was refused in order that death might be hastened. When opportunity served, some leaped overboard in the hope of being taken back to Africa. Throughout the night the hold resounded with the moans of those who awoke from dreams of home to find themselves in bonds. Women became hysterical, and both men and women became insane. Fearful and contagious diseases broke out. Smallpox was one of these. More common was ophthalmia, a frightful inflammation of the eyes. A blind, and hence a worthless, slave was thrown to the sharks. The putrid atmosphere, the melancholy, and the sudden transition from heat to cold greatly increased the mortality, and frequently when morning came a dead and a living slave were found shackled together. A captain always counted on losing one-fourth of his cargo. Sometimes he lost a great deal more.
Back on the shore a gray figure with strained gaze watched the ship fade away—an old woman sadly typical of the great African mother. With her vision she better than any one else perceived the meaning of it all. The men with hard faces who came to buy and sell might deceive others, but not her. In a great vague way she felt that something wrong had attacked the very heart of her people. She saw men wild with the whiskey of the Christian nations commit crimes undreamed of before. She did not like the coast towns; the girl who went thither came not home again, and a young man was lost to all that Africa held dear. In course of time she saw every native craft despised, and instead of the fabric that her own fingers wove her children yearned for the tinsel and the gewgaws of the trader. She cursed this man, and she called upon all her spirits to banish the evil. But when at last all was of no avail—when the strongest youth or the dearest maiden had gone—she went back to her hut and ate her heart out in the darkness. She wept for her children and would not be comforted because they were not. Then slowly to the untutored mind somehow came the promise: "These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.... They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat. For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters; and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes."
Footnote 1: [(return)]
Note article "Africa" in New International Encyclopedia, referring especially to the studies of Von Luschan.
Footnote 2: [(return)]
Leo Wiener: Africa and the Discovery of America, Vol. I, Innes & Sons, Philadelphia, 1920.
Footnote 3: [(return)]
A Tropical Dependency, James Nisbet & Co., Ltd., London, 1906, p. 17.
Footnote 4: [(return)]
See Wiener, I, 178.
Footnote 5: [(return)]
Spain in America, Vol. 3 in American Nation Series, p. 270.
Footnote 6: [(return)]
Frederick W. Hodge, 3, in Spanish Explorers in the Southern United States, 1528-1543, in "Original Narratives of Early American History," Scribner's, New York, 1907. Both the Narrative of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca and the Narrative of the Expedition of Coronado, by Pedro de Casteñada, are edited by Hodge, with illuminating introductions.
Footnote 7: [(return)]
Edward E. Hale in Justin Winsor's Narrative and Critical History of America, III, 60.
Footnote 8: [(return)]
Bogart: Economic History, 72.
Footnote 9: [(return)]
Coman: Industrial History, 78.
Footnote 10: [(return)]
Ballagh: Slavery in Virginia, 12.
Footnote 11: [(return)]
Hening: Statutes, II, 26.
Footnote 12: [(return)]
Coffin: Slave Insurrections, 8.
Footnote 13: [(return)]
Turner: The Negro in Pennsylvania, 1.
Footnote 14: [(return)]
Ibid., 21.
Footnote 15: [(return)]
Faust: The German Element in the United States, Boston, 1909, I, 45.
Footnote 16: [(return)]
William T. Alexander: History of the Colored Race in America, New Orleans, 1887, p. 136.
Footnote 17: [(return)]
DuBois: Suppression of the Slave-Trade, 34.
Footnote 18: [(return)]
Virginia Magazine of History, VII, 364.
Footnote 19: [(return)]
Bogart: Economic History, 73.
Footnote 20: [(return)]
Gayarré: History of Louisiana, I, 435.
Footnote 21: [(return)]
Ibid., I, 440.
[CHAPTER II]
THE NEGRO IN THE COLONIES
The Negroes who were brought from Africa to America were brought hither to work, and to work under compulsion; hence any study of their social life in the colonial era must be primarily a study of their life under the system of slavery, and of the efforts of individuals to break away from the same.
1. [Servitude and Slavery]
For the antecedents of Negro slavery in America one must go back to the system of indentured labor known as servitude. This has been defined as "a legalized status of Indian, white, and Negro servants preceding slavery in most, if not all, of the English mainland colonies."[22] A study of servitude will explain many of the acts with reference to Negroes, especially those about intermarriage with white people. For the origins of the system one must go back to social conditions in England in the seventeenth century. While villeinage had been formally abolished in England at the middle of the fourteenth century, it still lingered in remote places, and even if men were not technically villeins they might be subjected to long periods of service. By the middle of the fifteenth century the demand for wool had led to the enclosure of many farms for sheep-raising, and accordingly to distress on the part of many agricultural laborers. Conditions were not improved early in the sixteenth century, and they were in fact made more acute, the abolition of the monasteries doing away with many of the sources of relief. Men out of work were thrown upon the highways and thus became a menace to society. In 1564 the price of wheat was 19s. a quarter and wages were 7d. a day. The situation steadily grew worse, and in 1610, while wages were still the same, wheat was 35s. a quarter. Rents were constantly rising, moreover, and many persons died from starvation. In the course of the seventeenth century paupers and dissolute persons more and more filled the jails and workhouses.
Meanwhile in the young colonies across the sea labor was scarce, and it seemed to many an act of benevolence to bring from England persons who could not possibly make a living at home and give them some chance in the New World. From the very first, children, and especially young people between the ages of twelve and twenty, were the most desired. The London Company undertook to meet half of the cost of the transportation and maintenance of children sent out by parish authorities, the understanding being that it would have the service of the same until they were of age.[23] The Company was to teach each boy a trade and when his freedom year arrived was to give to each one fifty acres, a cow, some seed corn, tools, and firearms. He then became the Company's tenant, for seven years more giving to it one-half of his produce, at the end of which time he came into full possession of twenty-five acres. After the Company collapsed individuals took up the idea. Children under twelve years of age might be bound for seven years, and persons over twenty-one for no more than four; but the common term was five years.
Under this system fell servants voluntary and involuntary. Hundreds of people, too poor to pay for their transportation, sold themselves for a number of years to pay for the transfer. Some who were known as "freewillers" had some days in which to dispose of themselves to the best advantage in America; if they could not make satisfactory terms, they too were sold to pay for the passage. More important from the standpoint of the system itself, however, was the number of involuntary servants brought hither. Political offenders, vagrants, and other criminals were thus sent to the colonies, and many persons, especially boys and girls, were kidnapped in the streets of London and "spirited" away. Thus came Irishmen or Scotchmen who had incurred the ire of the crown, Cavaliers or Roundheads according as one party or the other was out of power, and farmers who had engaged in Monmouth's rebellion; and in the year 1680 alone it was estimated that not less than ten thousand persons were "spirited" away from England. It is easy to see how such a system became a highly profitable one for shipmasters and those in connivance with them. Virginia objected to the criminals, and in 1671 the House of Burgesses passed a law against the importing of such persons, and the same was approved by the governor. Seven years later, however, it was set aside for the transportation of political offenders.
As having the status of an apprentice the servant could sue in court and he was regularly allowed "freedom dues" at the expiration of his term. He could not vote, however, could not bear weapons, and of course could not hold office. In some cases, especially where the system was voluntary, servants sustained kindly relations with their masters, a few even becoming secretaries or tutors. More commonly, however, the lot of the indentured laborer was a hard one, his food often being only coarse Indian meal, and water mixed with molasses. The moral effect of the system was bad in the fate to which it subjected woman and in the evils resulting from the sale of the labor of children. In this whole connection, however, it is to be remembered that the standards of the day were very different from those of our own. The modern humanitarian impulse had not yet moved the heart of England, and flogging was still common for soldiers and sailors, criminals and children alike.
The first Negroes brought to the colonies were technically servants, and generally as Negro slavery advanced white servitude declined. James II, in fact, did whatever he could to hasten the end of servitude in order that slavery might become more profitable. Economic forces were with him, for while a slave varied in price from £10 to £50, the mere cost of transporting a servant was from £6 to £10. "Servitude became slavery when to such incidents as alienation, disfranchisement, whipping, and limited marriage were added those of perpetual service and a denial of civil, juridical, marital and property rights as well as the denial of the possession of children."[24] Even after slavery was well established, however, white men and women were frequently retained as domestic servants, and the system of servitude did not finally pass in all of its phases before the beginning of the Revolutionary War.
Negro slavery was thus distinctively an evolution. As the first Negroes were taken by pirates, the rights of ownership could not legally be given to those who purchased them; hence slavery by custom preceded slavery by statute. Little by little the colonies drifted into the sterner system. The transition was marked by such an act as that in Rhode Island, which in 1652 permitted a Negro to be bound for ten years. We have already referred to the Act of Assembly in Virginia in 1661 to the effect that Negroes were incapable of making satisfaction for time lost in running away by addition of time. Even before it had become generally enacted or understood in the colonies, however, that a child born of slave parents should serve for life, a new question had arisen, that of the issue of a free person and a slave. This led Virginia in 1662 to lead the way with an act declaring that the status of a child should be determined by that of the mother,[25] which act both gave to slavery the sanction of law and made it hereditary. From this time forth Virginia took a commanding lead in legislation; and it is to be remembered that when we refer to this province we by no means have reference to the comparatively small state of to-day, but to the richest and most populous of the colonies. This position Virginia maintained until after the Revolutionary War, and not only the present West Virginia but the great Northwest Territory were included in her domain.
The slave had none of the ordinary rights of citizenship; in a criminal case he could be arrested, tried, and condemned with but one witness against him, and he could be sentenced without a jury. In Virginia in 1630 one Hugh Davis was ordered to be "soundly whipped before an assembly of Negroes and others, for abusing himself to the dishonor of God and the shame of Christians, by defiling his body in lying with a Negro."[26] Just ten years afterwards, in 1640, one Robert Sweet was ordered "to do penance in church, according to the laws of England, for getting a Negro woman with child, and the woman to be whipped."[27] Thus from the very beginning the intermixture of the races was frowned upon and went on all the same. By the time, moreover, that the important acts of 1661 and 1662 had formally sanctioned slavery, doubt had arisen in the minds of some Virginians as to whether one Christian could legitimately hold another in bondage; and in 1667 it was definitely stated that the conferring of baptism did not alter the condition of a person as to his bondage or freedom, so that masters, freed from this doubt, could now "more carefully endeavor the propagation of Christianity." In 1669 an "act about the casual killing of slaves" provided that if any slave resisted his master and under the extremity of punishment chanced to die, his death was not to be considered a felony and the master was to be acquitted. In 1670 it was made clear that none but freeholders and housekeepers should vote in the election of burgesses, and in the same year provision was taken against the possible ownership of a white servant by a free Negro, who nevertheless "was not debarred from buying any of his own nation." In 1692 there was legislation "for the more speedy prosecution of slaves committing capital crimes"; and this was reënacted in 1705, when some provision was made for the compensation of owners and when it was further declared that Negro, mulatto, and Indian slaves within the dominion were "real estate" and "incapable in law to be witnesses in any cases whatsoever"; and in 1723 there was an elaborate and detailed act "directing the trial of slaves committing capital crimes, and for the more effectual punishing conspiracies and insurrections of them, and for the better government of Negroes, mulattoes, and Indians, bond or free." This last act specifically stated that no slave should be set free upon any pretense whatsoever "except for some meritorious services, to be adjudged and allowed by the governor and council." All this legislation was soon found to be too drastic and too difficult to enforce, and modification was inevitable. This came in 1732, when it was made possible for a slave to be a witness when another slave was on trial for a capital offense, and in 1744 this provision was extended to civil cases as well. In 1748 there was a general revision of all existing legislation, with special provision against attempted insurrections.
Thus did Virginia pave the way, and more and more slave codes took on some degree of definiteness and uniformity. Very important was the act of 1705, which provided that a slave might be inventoried as real estate. As property henceforth there was nothing to prevent his being separated from his family. Before the law he was no longer a person but a thing.
2. [The Indian, the Mulatto, and the Free Negro]
All along, it is to be observed, the problem of the Negro was complicated by that of the Indian. At first there was a feeling that Indians were to be treated not as Negroes but as on the same basis as Englishmen. An act in Virginia of 1661-2 summed up this feeling in the provision that they were not to be sold as servants for any longer time than English people of the same age, and injuries done to them were to be duly remedied by the laws of England. About the same time a Powhatan Indian sold for life was ordered to be set free. An interesting enactment of 1670 attempted to give the Indian an intermediate status between that of the Englishman and the Negro slave, as "servants not being Christians, imported into the colony by shipping" (i.e., Negroes) were to be slaves for their lives, but those that came by land were to serve "if boys or girls until thirty years of age; if men or women, twelve years and no longer." All such legislation, however, was radically changed as a result of Nathaniel Bacon's rebellion of 1676, in which the aid of the natives was invoked against the English governor. Henceforth Indians taken in war became the slaves for life of their captors. An elaborate act of 1682 summed up the new status, and Indians sold by other Indians were to be "adjudged, deemed, and taken to be slaves, to all intents and purposes, any law, usage, or custom to the contrary notwithstanding." Indian women were to be "tithables,"[28] and they were required to pay levies just as Negro women. From this time forth enactments generally included Indians along with Negroes, but of course the laws placed on the statute books did not always bear close relation to what was actually enforced, and in general the Indian was destined to be a vanishing rather than a growing problem. Very early in the eighteenth century, in connection with the wars between the English and the Spanish in Florida, hundreds of Indians were shipped to the West Indies and some to New England. Massachusetts in 1712 prohibited such importation, as the Indians were "malicious, surly, and very ungovernable," and she was followed to similar effect by Pennsylvania in 1712, by New Hampshire in 1714, and by Connecticut and Rhode Island in 1715.
If the Indian was destined to be a vanishing factor, the mulatto and the free Negro most certainly were not. In spite of all the laws to prevent it, the intermixture of the races increased, and manumission somehow also increased. Sometimes a master in his will provided that several of his slaves should be given their freedom. Occasionally a slave became free by reason of what was regarded as an act of service to the commonwealth, as in the case of one Will, slave belonging to Robert Ruffin, of the county of Surry in Virginia, who in 1710 divulged a conspiracy.[29] There is, moreover, on record a case of an indentured Negro servant, John Geaween, who by his unusual thrift in the matter of some hogs which he raised on the share system with his master, was able as early as 1641 to purchase his own son from another master, to the perfect satisfaction of all concerned.[30] Of special importance for some years were those persons who were descendants of Negro fathers and indentured white mothers, and who at first were of course legally free. By 1691 the problem had become acute in Virginia. In this year "for prevention of that abominable mixture and spurious issue, which hereafter may increase in this dominion, as well by Negroes, mulattoes and Indians intermarrying with English or other white women, as by their unlawful accompanying with one another," it was enacted that "for the time to come whatsoever English or other white man or woman being free shall intermarry with a Negro, mulatto, or Indian man or woman, bond or free, shall within three months after such marriage be banished and removed from this dominion forever, and that the justices of each respective county within this dominion make it their particular care that this act be put in effectual execution."[31] A white woman who became the mother of a child by a Negro or mulatto was to be fined £15 sterling, in default of payment was to be sold for five years, while the child was to be bound in servitude to the church wardens until thirty years of age. It was further provided that if any Negro or mulatto was set free, he was to be transported from the country within six months of his manumission (which enactment is typical of those that it was difficult to enforce and that after a while were only irregularly observed). In 1705 it was enacted that no "Negro, mulatto, or Indian shall from and after the publication of this act bear any office ecclesiastical, civil or military, or be in any place of public trust or power, within this her majesty's colony and dominion of Virginia"; and to clear any doubt that might arise as to who should be accounted a mulatto, it was provided that "the child of an Indian, and the child, grandchild, or great-grandchild of a Negro shall be deemed, accounted, held, and taken to be a mulatto." It will be observed that while the act of 1670 said that "none but freeholders and housekeepers" could vote, this act of 1705 did not specifically legislate against voting by a mulatto or a free Negro, and that some such privilege was exercised for a while appears from the definite provision in 1723 that "no free Negro, mulatto, or Indian, whatsoever, shall hereafter have any vote at the election of burgesses, or any other election whatsoever." In the same year it was provided that free Negroes and mulattoes might be employed as drummers or trumpeters in servile labor, but that they were not to bear arms; and all free Negroes above sixteen years of age were declared tithable. In 1769, however, all free Negro and mulatto women were exempted from levies as tithables, such levies having proved to be burdensome and "derogatory to the rights of freeborn subjects."
More than other colonies Maryland seems to have been troubled about the intermixture of the races; certainly no other phase of slavery here received so much attention. This was due to the unusual emphasis on white servitude in the colony. In 1663 it was enacted that any freeborn woman intermarrying with a slave should serve the master of the slave during the life of her husband and that any children resulting from the union were also to be slaves. This act was evidently intended to frighten the indentured woman from such a marriage. It had a very different effect. Many masters, in order to prolong the indenture of their white female servants, encouraged them to marry Negro slaves. Accordingly a new law in 1681 threw the responsibility not on the indentured woman but on the master or mistress; in case a marriage took place between a white woman-servant and a slave, the woman was to be free at once, any possible issue was to be free, and the minister performing the ceremony and the master or mistress were to be fined ten thousand pounds of tobacco. This did not finally dispose of the problem, however, and in 1715, in response to a slightly different situation, it was enacted that a white woman who became the mother of a child by a free Negro father should become a servant for seven years, the father also a servant for seven years, and the child a servant until thirty-one years of age. Any white man who begot a Negro woman with child, whether a free woman or a slave, was to undergo the same penalty as a white woman—a provision that in course of time was notoriously disregarded. In 1717 the problem was still unsettled, and in this year it was enacted that Negroes or mulattoes of either sex intermarrying with white people were to be slaves for life, except mulattoes born of white women, who were to serve for seven years, and the white person so intermarrying also for seven years. It is needless to say that with all these changing and contradictory provisions many servants and Negroes did not even know what the law was. In 1728, however, free mulatto women having illegitimate children by Negroes and other slaves, and free Negro women having illegitimate children by white men, and their issue, were subjected to the same penalties as in the former act were provided against white women. Thus vainly did the colony of Maryland struggle with the problem of race intermixture. Generally throughout the South the rule in the matter of the child of the Negro father and the indentured white mother was that the child should be bound in servitude for thirty or thirty-one years.
In the North as well as in the South the intermingling of the blood of the races was discountenanced. In Pennsylvania as early as 1677 a white servant was indicted for cohabiting with a Negro. In 1698 the Chester County court laid it down as a principle that the mingling of the races was not to be allowed. In 1722 a woman was punished for promoting a secret marriage between a white woman and a Negro; a little later the Assembly received from the inhabitants of the province a petition inveighing against cohabiting; and in 1725-6 a law was passed positively forbidding the mixture of the races.[32] In Massachusetts as early as 1705 and 1708 restraining acts to prevent a "spurious and mixt issue" ordered the sale of offending Negroes and mulattoes out of the colony's jurisdiction, and punished Christians who intermarried with them by a fine of £50. After the Revolutionary War such marriages were declared void and the penalty of £50 was still exacted, and not until 1843 was this act repealed. Thus was the color-line, with its social and legal distinctions, extended beyond the conditions of servitude and slavery, and thus early was an important phase of the ultimate Negro Problem foreshadowed.
Generally then, in the South, in the colonial period, the free Negro could not vote, could not hold civil office, could not give testimony in cases involving white men, and could be employed only for fatigue duty in the militia. He could not purchase white servants, could not intermarry with white people, and had to be very circumspect in his relations with slaves. No deprivation of privilege, however, relieved him of the obligation to pay taxes. Such advantages as he possessed were mainly economic. The money gained from his labor was his own; he might become skilled at a trade; he might buy land; he might buy slaves;[33] he might even buy his wife and child if, as most frequently happened, they were slaves; and he might have one gun with which to protect his home.[34] Once in a long while he might even find some opportunity for education, as when the church became the legal warden of Negro apprentices. Frequently he found a place in such a trade as that of the barber or in other personal service, and such work accounted very largely for the fact that he was generally permitted to remain in communities where technically he had no right to be. In the North his situation was little better than in the South, and along economic lines even harder. Everywhere his position was a difficult one. He was most frequently regarded as idle and shiftless, and as a breeder of mischief; but if he showed unusual thrift he might even be forced to leave his home and go elsewhere. Liberty, the boon of every citizen, the free Negro did not possess. For all the finer things of life—the things that make life worth living—the lot that was his was only less hard than that of the slave.
3. [First Effort for Social Betterment]
If now we turn aside from laws and statutes and consider the ordinary life and social intercourse of the Negro, we shall find more than one contradiction, for in the colonial era codes affecting slaves and free Negroes had to grope their way to uniformity. Especially is it necessary to distinguish between the earlier and the later years of the period, for as early as 1760 the liberalism of the Revolutionary era began to be felt. If we consider what was strictly the colonial epoch, we may find it necessary to make a division about the year 1705. Before this date the status of the Negro was complicated by the incidents of the system of servitude; after it, however, in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts alike, special discrimination against him on account of race was given formal recognition.
By 1715 there were in Virginia 23,000 Negroes, and in all the colonies 58,850, or 14 per cent of the total population.[35] By 1756, however, the Negroes in Virginia numbered 120,156 and the white people but 173,316.[36] Thirty-eight of the forty-nine counties had more Negro than white tithables, and eleven of the counties had a Negro population varying from one-fourth to one-half more than the white. A great many of the Negroes had only recently been imported from Africa, and they were especially baffling to their masters of course when they conversed in their native tongues. At first only men were brought, but soon women came also, and the treatment accorded these people varied all the way from occasional indulgence to the utmost cruelty. The hours of work regularly extended from sunrise to sunset, though corn-husking and rice-beating were sometimes continued after dark, and overseers were almost invariably ruthless, often having a share in the crops. Those who were house-servants would go about only partially clad, and the slave might be marked or branded like one of the lower animals; he was not thought to have a soul, and the law sought to deprive him of all human attributes. Holiday amusement consisted largely of the dances that the Negroes had brought with them, these being accompanied by the beating of drums and the blowing of horns; and funeral ceremonies featured African mummeries. For those who were criminal offenders simple execution was not always considered severe enough; the right hand might first be amputated, the criminal then hanged and his head cut off, and his body quartered and the parts suspended in public places. Sometimes the hanging was in chains, and several instances of burning are on record. A master was regularly reimbursed by the government for a slave legally executed, and in 1714 there was a complaint in South Carolina that the treasury had become almost exhausted by such reimbursements. In Massachusetts hanging was the worst legal penalty, but the obsolete common-law punishment was revived in 1755 to burn alive a slave-woman who had killed her master in Cambridge.[37]
The relations between the free Negro and the slave might well have given cause for concern. Above what was after all only an artificial barrier spoke the call of race and frequently of kindred. Sometimes at a later date jealousy arose when a master employed a free Negro to work with his slaves, the one receiving pay and the others laboring without compensation. In general, however, the two groups worked like brothers, each giving the other the benefit of any temporary advantage that it possessed. Sometimes the free Negro could serve by reason of the greater freedom of movement that he had, and if no one would employ him, or if, as frequently happened, he was browbeaten and cheated out of the reward of his labor, the slave might somehow see that he got something to eat. In a state of society in which the relation of master and slave was the rule, there was of course little place for either the free Negro or the poor white man. When the pressure became too great the white man moved away; the Negro, finding himself everywhere buffeted, in the colonial era at least had little choice but to work out his salvation at home as well as he could. More and more character told, and if a man had made himself known for his industry and usefulness, a legislative act might even be passed permitting him to remain in the face of a hostile law. Even before 1700 there were in Virginia families in which both parents were free colored persons and in which every effort was made to bring up the children in honesty and morality. When some prosperous Negroes found themselves able to do so, they occasionally purchased Negroes, who might be their own children or brothers, in order to give them that protection without which on account of recent manumission they might be required to leave the colony in which they were born. Thus, whatever the motive, the tie that bound the free Negro and the slave was a strong one; and in spite of the fact that Negroes who owned slaves were generally known as hard masters, as soon as any men of the race began to be really prominent their best endeavor was devoted to the advancement of their people. It was not until immediately after the Revolutionary War, however, that leaders of vision and statesmanship began to be developed.
It was only the materialism of the eighteenth century that accounted for the amazing development of the system of Negro slavery, and only this that defeated the benevolence of Oglethorpe's scheme for the founding of Georgia. As yet there was no united protest—no general movement for freedom; and as Von Holst said long afterwards, "If the agitation had been wholly left to the churches, it would have been long before men could have rightly spoken of 'a slavery question.'" The Puritans, however, were not wholly unmindful of the evil, and the Quakers were untiring in their opposition, though it was Roger Williams who in 1637 made the first protest that appears in the colonies.[38] Both John Eliot and Cotton Mather were somewhat generally concerned about the harsh treatment of the Negro and the neglect of his spiritual welfare. Somewhat more to the point was Richard Baxter, the eminent English nonconformist, who was a contemporary of both of these men. "Remember," said he, in speaking of Negroes and other slaves, "that they are of as good a kind as you; that is, they are reasonable creatures as well as you, and born to as much natural liberty. If their sin have enslaved them to you, yet Nature made them your equals." On the subject of man-stealing he is even stronger: "To go as pirates and catch up poor Negroes or people of another land, that never forfeited life or liberty, and to make them slaves, and sell them, is one of the worst kinds of thievery in the world." Such statements, however, were not more than the voice of individual opinion. The principles of the Quakers carried them far beyond the Puritans, and their history shows what might have been accomplished if other denominations had been as sincere and as unselfish as the Society of Friends. The Germantown protest of 1688 has already been remarked. In 1693 George Keith, in speaking of fugitives, quoted with telling effect the text, "Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant which is escaped from his master unto thee" (Deut. 23.15). In 1696 the Yearly Meeting in Pennsylvania first took definite action in giving as its advice "that Friends be careful not to encourage the bringing in of any more Negroes; and that such that have Negroes, be careful of them, bring them to meetings, have meetings with them in their families, and restrain them from loose and lewd living as much as in them lies, and from rambling abroad on First-days or other times."[39] As early as 1713 the Quakers had in mind a scheme for freeing the Negroes and returning them to Africa, and by 1715 their efforts against importation had seriously impaired the market for slaves in Philadelphia. Within a century after the Germantown protest the abolition of slavery among the Quakers was practically accomplished.
In the very early period there seems to have been little objection to giving a free Negro not only religious but also secular instruction; indeed he might be entitled to this, as in Virginia, where in 1691 the church became the agency through which the laws of Negro apprenticeship were carried out; thus in 1727 it was ordered that David James, a free Negro boy, be bound to Mr. James Isdel, who was to "teach him to read the Bible distinctly, also the trade of a gunsmith" and "carry him to the clerk's office and take indenture to that purpose."[40] In general the English church did a good deal to provide for the religious instruction of the free Negro; "the reports made in 1724 to the English bishop by the Virginia parish ministers are evidence that the few free Negroes in the parishes were permitted to be baptized, and were received into the church when they had been taught the catechism."[41] Among Negroes, moreover, as well as others in the colonies the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts was active. As early as 1705, in Goose Creek Parish in South Carolina, among a population largely recently imported from Africa, a missionary had among his communicants twenty blacks who well understood the English tongue.[42] The most effective work of the Society, however, was in New York, where as early as 1704 a school was opened by Elias Neau, a Frenchman who after several years of imprisonment because of his Protestant faith had come to New York to try his fortune as a trader. In 1703 he had called the attention of the Society to the Negroes who were "without God in the world, and of whose souls there was no manner of care taken," and had suggested the appointment of a catechist. He himself was prevailed upon to take up the work and he accordingly resigned his position as an elder in the French church and conformed to the Church of England. He worked with success for a number of years, but in 1712 was embarrassed by the charge that his school fomented the insurrection that was planned in that year. He finally showed, however, that only one of his students was in any way connected with the uprising.
From slave advertisements of the eighteenth century[43] we may gain many sidelights not only on the education of Negroes in the colonial era, but on their environment and suffering as well. One slave "can write a pretty good hand; plays on the fife extremely well." Another "can both read and write and is a good fiddler." Still others speak "Dutch and good English," "good English and High Dutch," or "Swede and English well." Charles Thomas of Delaware bore the following remarkable characterization: "Very black, has white teeth ... has had his left leg broke ... speaks both French and English, and is a very great rogue." One man who came from the West Indies "was born in Dominica and speaks French, but very little English; he is a very ill-natured fellow and has been much cut in his back by often whipping." A Negro named Simon who in 1740 ran away in Pennsylvania "could bleed and draw teeth pretending to be a great doctor." Worst of all the incidents of slavery, however, was the lack of regard for home ties, and this situation of course obtained in the North as well as the South. In the early part of the eighteenth century marriages in New York were by mutual consent only, without the blessing of the church, and burial was in a common field without any Christian office. In Massachusetts in 1710 Rev. Samuel Phillips drew up a marriage formulary especially designed for slaves and concluding as follows: "For you must both of you bear in mind that you remain still, as really and truly as ever, 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."[44] In Massachusetts, however, as in New York, marriage was most often by common consent simply, without the office of ministers.
As yet there was no racial consciousness, no church, no business organization, and the chief coöperative effort was in insurrection. Until the great chain of slavery was thrown off, little independent effort could be put forth. Even in the state of servitude or slavery, however, the social spirit of the race yearned to assert itself, and such an event as a funeral was attractive primarily because of the social features that it developed. As early as 1693 there is record of the formation of a distinct society by Negroes. In one of his manuscript diaries, preserved in the library of the Massachusetts Historical Society,[45] Cotton Mather in October of this year wrote as follows: "Besides the other praying and pious meetings which I have been continually serving in our neighborhood, a little after this period a company of poor Negroes, of their own accord, addressed me, for my countenance to a design which they had, of erecting such a meeting for the welfare of their miserable nation, that were servants among us. I allowed their design and went one evening and prayed and preached (on Ps. 68.31) with them; and gave them the following orders, which I insert duly for the curiosity of the occasion." The Rules to which Mather here refers are noteworthy as containing not one suggestion of anti-slavery sentiment, and as portraying the altogether abject situation of the Negro at the time he wrote; nevertheless the text used was an inspiring one, and in any case the document must have historical importance as the earliest thing that has come down to us in the nature of the constitution or by-laws for a distinctively Negro organization. It is herewith given entire:
Rules for the Society of Negroes. 1693.
We the Miserable Children of Adam, and of Noah, thankfully Admiring and Accepting the Free-Grace of GOD, that Offers to Save us from our Miseries, by the Lord Jesus Christ, freely Resolve, with His Help, to become the Servants of that Glorious LORD.
And that we may be Assisted in the Service of our Heavenly Master, we now join together in a SOCIETY, wherein the following RULES are to be observed.
I. It shall be our Endeavor, to Meet in the Evening after the Sabbath; and Pray together by Turns, one to Begin, and another to Conclude the Meeting; And between the two Prayers, a Psalm shall be sung, and a Sermon Repeated.
II. Our coming to the Meeting, shall never be without the Leave of such as have Power over us: And we will be Careful, that our Meeting may Begin and Conclude between the Hours of Seven and Nine; and that we may not be unseasonably Absent from the Families whereto we pertain.
III. As we will, with the help of God, at all Times avoid all Wicked Company, so we will Receive none into our Meeting, but such as have sensibly Reformed their lives from all manner of Wickedness. And, therefore, None shall be Admitted, without the Knowledge and Consent of the Minister of God in this place; unto whom we will also carry every Person, that seeks for Admission among us; to be by Him Examined, Instructed and Exhorted.
IV. We will, as often as may be, Obtain some Wise and Good Man, of the English in the Neighborhood, and especially the Officers of the Church, to look in upon us, and by their Presence and Counsel, do what they think fitting for us.
V. If any of our Number fall into the Sin of Drunkenness, or Swearing, or Cursing, or Lying, or Stealing, or notorious Disobedience or Unfaithfulness unto their Masters, we will Admonish him of his Miscarriage, and Forbid his coming to the Meeting, for at least one Fortnight; And except he then come with great Signs and Hopes of his Repentance, we will utterly Exclude him, with Blotting his Name out of our list.
VI. If any of our Society Defile himself with Fornication, we will give him our Admonition; and so, debar him from the Meeting, at least half a Year: Nor shall he Return to it, ever any more, without Exemplary Testimonies of his becoming a New Creature.
VII. We will, as we have Opportunity, set ourselves to do all the Good we can, to the other Negro-Servants in the Town; And if any of them should, at unfit Hours, be Abroad, much more, if any of them should Run away from their Masters, we will afford them no Shelter: But we will do what in us lies, that they may be discovered, and punished. And if any of us are found Faulty in this matter, they shall be no longer of us.
VIII. None of our Society shall be Absent from our Meeting, without giving a Reason of the Absence; and if it be found, that any have pretended unto their Owners, that they came unto the Meeting, when they were otherwise and elsewhere Employed, we will faithfully Inform their Owners, and also do what we can to Reclaim such Person from all such Evil Courses for the Future:
IX. It shall be expected from every one in the Society, that he learn the Catechism; And therefore, it shall be one of our usual Exercises, for one of us, to ask the Questions, and for all the rest in their Order, to say the Answers in the Catechism; Either, The New English Catechism, or the Assemblies Catechism, or the Catechism in the Negro Christianised.
4. [Early Insurrections]
The Negroes who came to America directly from Africa in the eighteenth century were strikingly different from those whom generations of servitude later made comparatively docile. They were wild and turbulent in disposition and were likely at any moment to take revenge for the great wrong that had been inflicted upon them. The planters in the South knew this and lived in constant fear of uprisings. When the situation became too threatening, they placed prohibitive duties on importations, and they also sought to keep their slaves in subjection by barbarous and cruel modes of punishment, both crucifixion and burning being legalized in some early codes. On sea as well as on land Negroes frequently rose upon those who held them in bondage, and sometimes they actually won their freedom. More and more, however, in any study of Negro insurrections it becomes difficult to distinguish between a clearly organized revolt and what might be regarded as simply a personal crime, so that those uprisings considered in the following discussion can only be construed as the more representative of the many attempts for freedom made by Negro slaves in the colonial era.
In 1687 there was in Virginia a conspiracy among the Negroes in the Northern Neck that was detected just in time to prevent slaughter, and in Surry County in 1710 there was a similar plot, betrayed by one of the conspirators. In 1711, in South Carolina, several Negroes ran away from their masters and "kept out, armed, robbing and plundering houses and plantations, and putting the inhabitants of the province in great fear and terror";[46] and Governor Gibbes more than once wrote to the legislature about amending the Negro Act, as the one already in force did "not reach up to some of the crimes" that were daily being committed. For one Sebastian, "a Spanish Negro," alive or dead, a reward of £50 was offered, and he was at length brought in by the Indians and taken in triumph to Charleston. In 1712 in New York occurred an outbreak that occasioned greater excitement than any uprising that had preceded it in the colonies. Early in the morning of April 7 some slaves of the Carmantee and Pappa tribes who had suffered ill-usage, set on fire the house of Peter van Tilburgh, and, armed with guns and knives, killed and wounded several persons who came to extinguish the flames. They fled, however, when the Governor ordered the cannon to be fired to alarm the town, and they got away to the woods as well as they could, but not before they had killed several more of the citizens. Some shot themselves in the woods and others were captured. Altogether eight or ten white persons were killed, and, aside from those Negroes who had committed suicide, eighteen or more were executed, several others being transported. Of those executed one was hanged alive in chains, some were burned at the stake, and one was left to die a lingering death before the gaze of the town.
In May, 1720, some Negroes in South Carolina were fairly well organized and killed a man named Benjamin Cattle, one white woman, and a little Negro boy. They were pursued and twenty-three taken and six convicted. Three of the latter were executed, the other three escaping. In October, 1722, the Negroes near the mouth of the Rappahannock in Virginia undertook to kill the white people while the latter were assembled in church, but were discovered and put to flight. On this occasion, as on most others, Sunday was the day chosen for the outbreak, the Negroes then being best able to get together. In April, 1723, it was thought that some fires in Boston had been started by Negroes, and the selectmen recommended that if more than two Negroes were found "lurking together" on the streets they should be put in the house of correction. In 1728 there was a well organized attempt in Savannah, then a place of three thousand white people and two thousand seven hundred Negroes. The plan to kill all the white people failed because of disagreement as to the exact method; but the body of Negroes had to be, fired on more than once before it dispersed. In 1730 there was in Williamsburg, Va., an insurrection that grew out of a report that Colonel Spotswood had orders from the king to free all baptized persons on his arrival; men from all the surrounding counties had to be called in before it could be put down.
The first open rebellion in South Carolina in which Negroes were "actually armed and embodied"[47] took place in 1730. The plan was for each Negro to kill his master in the dead of night, then for all to assemble supposedly for a dancing-bout, rush upon the heart of the city, take possession of the arms, and kill any white man they saw. The plot was discovered and the leaders executed. In this same colony three formidable insurrections broke out within the one year 1739—one in St. Paul's Parish, one in St. John's, and one in Charleston. To some extent these seem to have been fomented by the Spaniards in the South, and in one of them six houses were burned and as many as twenty-five white people killed. The Negroes were pursued and fourteen killed. Within two days "twenty more were killed, and forty were taken, some of whom were shot, some hanged, and some gibbeted alive."[48] This "examplary punishment," as Governor Gibbes called it, was by no means effective, for in the very next year, 1740, there broke out what might be considered the most formidable insurrection in the South in the whole colonial period. A number of Negroes, having assembled at Stono, first surprised, and killed two young men in a warehouse, from which they then took guns and ammunition.[49] They then elected as captain one of their own number named Cato, whom they agreed to follow, and they marched towards the southwest, with drums beating and colors flying, like a disciplined company. They entered the home of a man named Godfrey, and having murdered him and his wife and children, they took all the arms he had, set fire to the house, and proceeded towards Jonesboro. On their way they plundered and burned every house to which they came, killing every white person they found and compelling the Negroes to join them. Governor Bull, who happened to be returning to Charleston from the southward, met them, and observing them armed, spread the alarm, which soon reached the Presbyterian Church at Wilton, where a number of planters was assembled. The women were left in the church trembling with fear, while the militia formed and marched in quest of the Negroes, who by this time had become formidable from the number that had joined them. They had marched twelve miles and spread desolation through all the plantations on their way. They had then halted in an open field and too soon had begun to sing and drink and dance by way of triumph. During these rejoicings the militia discovered them and stationed themselves in different places around them to prevent their escape. One party then advanced into the open field and attacked the Negroes. Some were killed and the others were forced to the woods. Many ran back to the plantations, hoping thus to avoid suspicion, but most of them were taken and tried. Such as had been forced to join the uprising against their will were pardoned, but all of the chosen leaders and the first insurgents were put to death. All Carolina, we are told, was struck with terror and consternation by this insurrection, in which more than twenty white persons were killed. It was followed immediately by the famous and severe Negro Act of 1740, which among other provisions imposed a duty of £100 on Africans and £150 on colonial Negroes. This remained technically in force until 1822, and yet as soon as security and confidence were restored, there was a relaxation in the execution of the provisions of the act and the Negroes little by little regained confidence in themselves and again began to plan and act in concert.
About the time of Cato's insurrection there were also several uprisings at sea. In 1731, on a ship returning to Rhode Island from Guinea with a cargo of slaves, the Negroes rose and killed three of the crew, all the members of which died soon afterwards with the exception of the captain and his boy. The next year Captain John Major of Portsmouth, N.H., was murdered with all his crew, his schooner and cargo being seized by the slaves. In 1735 the captives on the Dolphin of London, while still on the coast of Africa, overpowered the crew, broke into the powder room, and finally in the course of their effort for freedom blew up both themselves and the crew.
A most remarkable design—as an insurrection perhaps not as formidable as that of Cato, but in some ways the most important single event in the history of the Negro in the colonial period—was the plot in the city of New York in 1741. New York was at the time a thriving town of twelve thousand inhabitants, and the calamity that now befell it was unfortunate in every way. It was not only a Negro insurrection, though the Negro finally suffered most bitterly. It was also a strange compound of the effects of whiskey and gambling, of the designs of abandoned white people, and of prejudice against the Catholics.
Prominent in the remarkable drama were John Hughson, a shoemaker and alehouse keeper; Sarah Hughson, his wife; John Romme, also a shoemaker and alehouse keeper; Margaret Kerry, alias Salinburgh, commonly known as Peggy; John Ury, a priest; and a number of Negroes, chief among whom were Cæsar, Prince, Cuffee, and Quack.[50] Prominent among those who helped to work out the plot were Mary Burton, a white servant of Hughson's, sixteen years of age; Arthur Price, a young white man who at the time of the proceedings happened to be in prison on a charge of stealing; a young seaman named Wilson; and two white women, Mrs. Earle and Mrs. Hogg, the latter of whom assisted in the store kept by her husband, Robert Hogg. Hughson's house on the outskirts of the town was a resort for Negroes, and Hughson himself aided and abetted the Negro men in any crime that they might commit. Romme was of similar quality. Peggy was a prostitute, and it was Cæsar who paid for her board with the Hughsons. In the previous summer she had found lodging with these people, a little later she had removed to Romme's, and just before Christmas she had come back to Hughson's, and a few weeks thereafter she became a mother. At both the public houses the Negroes would engage in drinking and gambling; and importance also attaches to an organization of theirs known as the Geneva Society, which had angered some of the white citizens by its imitation of the rites and forms of freemasonry.
Events really began on the night of Saturday, February 28, 1741, with a robbery in the house of Hogg, the merchant, from which were taken various pieces of linen and other goods, several silver coins, chiefly Spanish, and medals, to the value of about £60. On the day before, in the course of a simple purchase by Wilson, Mrs. Hogg had revealed to the young seaman her treasure. He soon spoke of the same to Cæsar, Prince, and Cuffee, with whom he was acquainted; he gave them the plan of the house, and they in turn spoke of the matter to Hughson. Wilson, however, when later told of the robbery by Mrs. Hogg, at once turned suspicion upon the Negroes, especially Cæsar; and Mary Burton testified that she saw some of the speckled linen in question in Peggy's room after Cæsar had gone thither.
On Wednesday, March 18, a fire broke out on the roof of His Majesty's House at Fort George. One week later, on March 25, there was a fire at the home of Captain Warren in the southwest end of the city, and the circumstances pointed to incendiary origin. One week later, on April 1, there was a fire in the storehouse of a man named Van Zant; on the following Saturday evening there was another fire, and while the people were returning from this there was still another; and on the next day, Sunday, there was another alarm, and by this time the whole town had been worked up to the highest pitch of excitement. As yet there was nothing to point to any connection between the stealing and the fires. On the day of the last one, however, Mrs. Earle happened to overhear remarks by three Negroes that caused suspicion to light upon them; Mary Burton was insisting that stolen goods had been brought by Prince and Cæsar to the house of her master; and although a search of the home of Hughson failed to produce a great deal, arrests were made right and left. The case was finally taken to the Supreme Court, and because of the white persons implicated, the summary methods ordinarily used in dealing with Negroes were waived for the time being.
Peggy at first withstood all questioning, denying any knowledge of the events that had taken place. One day in prison, however, she remarked to Arthur Price that she was afraid the Negroes would tell but that she would not forswear herself unless they brought her into the matter. "How forswear?" asked Price. "There are fourteen sworn," she said. "What, is it about Mr. Hogg's goods?" he asked. "No," she replied, "about the fire." "What, Peggy," asked Price, "were you going to set the town on fire?" "No," she replied, "but since I knew of it they made me swear." She also remarked that she had faith in Prince, Cuff, and Cæsar. All the while she used the vilest possible language, and at last, thinking suddenly that she had revealed too much, she turned upon Price and with an oath warned him that he had better keep his counsel. That afternoon she said further to him that she could not eat because Mary had brought her into the case.
A little later Peggy, much afraid, voluntarily confessed that early in May she was at the home of John Romme, where in the course of December the Negroes had had several meetings; among other things they had conspired to burn the fort first of all, then the city, then to get all the goods they could and kill anybody who had money. One evening just about Christmas, she said, Romme and his wife and ten or eleven Negroes had been together in a room. Romme had talked about how rich some people were, gradually working on the feelings of the Negroes and promising them that if they did not succeed in their designs he would take them to a strange country and set them free, meanwhile giving them the impression that he bore a charmed life. A little later, it appeared, Cæsar gave to Hughson £12; Hughson was then absent for three days, and when he came again he brought with him seven or eight guns, some pistols, and some swords.
As a result of these and other disclosures it was seen that not only Hughson and Romme but also Ury, who was not so much a priest as an adventurer, had instigated the plots of the Negroes; and Quack testified that Hughson was the first contriver of the plot to burn the houses of the town and kill the people, though he himself, he confessed, did fire the fort with a lighted stick. The punishment was terrible. Quack and Cuffee, the first to be executed, were burned at the stake on May 30. All through the summer the trials and the executions continued, harassing New York and indeed the whole country. Altogether twenty white persons were arrested; four—Hughson, his wife, Peggy, and Ury—were executed, and some of their acquaintances were forced to leave the province. One hundred and fifty-four Negroes were arrested. Thirteen were burned, eighteen were hanged, and seventy-one transported.
It is evident from these events and from the legislation of the era that, except for the earnest work of such a sect as the Quakers, there was little genuine effort for the improvement of the social condition of the Negro people in the colonies. They were not even regarded as potential citizens, and both in and out of the system of slavery were subjected to the harshest regulations. Towards amicable relations with the other racial elements that were coming to build up a new country only the slightest measure of progress was made. Instead, insurrection after insurrection revealed the sharpest antagonism, and any outbreak promptly called forth the severest and frequently the most cruel punishment.
Footnote 22: [(return)]
New International Encyclopædia, Article "Slavery."
Footnote 23: [(return)]
Coman: Industrial History, 42.
Footnote 24: [(return)]
New International Encyclopædia, Article "Slavery."
Footnote 25: [(return)]
Hening: Statutes, II, 170.
Footnote 26: [(return)]
Hening: Statutes, I, 146.
Footnote 27: [(return)]
Ibid., I, 552.
Footnote 28: [(return)]
Hurd, commenting on an act of 1649 declaring all imported male servants to be tithables, speaks as follows (230): "Tithables were persons assessed for a poll-tax, otherwise called the 'county levies.' At first, only free white persons were tithable. The law of 1645 provided for a tax on property and tithable persons. By 1648 property was released and taxes levied only on the tithables, at a specified poll-tax. Therefore by classing servants or slaves as tithables, the law attributes to them legal personality, or a membership in the social state inconsistent with the condition of a chattel or property."
Footnote 29: [(return)]
Hening: Statutes, III, 537.
Footnote 30: [(return)]
Virginia Magazine of History, X, 281.
Footnote 31: [(return)]
The penalty was so ineffective that in 1705 it was changed simply to imprisonment for six months "without bail or mainprise."
Footnote 32: [(return)]
Turner: The Negro in Pennsylvania, 29-30.
Footnote 33: [(return)]
Russell: The Free Negro in Virginia, 32-33, cites from the court records of Northampton County, 1651-1654 and 1655-1658, the noteworthy case of a free negro, Anthony Johnson, who had come to Virginia not later than 1622 and who by 1650 owned a large tract of land on the Eastern Shore. To him belonged a Negro, John Casor. After several years of labor Casor demanded his freedom on the ground that from the first he had been an indentured servant and not a slave. When the case came up in court, however, not only did Johnson win the verdict that Casor was his slave, but he also won his suit against Robert Parker, a white man, who he asserted had illegally detained Casor.
Footnote 34: [(return)]
Hening: Statutes, IV, 131.
Footnote 35: [(return)]
Blake: History of Slavery and the Slave-Trade, 378.
Footnote 36: [(return)]
Ballagh: Slavery in Virginia, 12.
Footnote 37: [(return)]
Edward Eggleston: "Social Conditions in the Colonies," in Century Magazine, October, 1884, p. 863.
Footnote 38: [(return)]
For this and the references immediately following note Locke: Anti-Slavery in America, 11-45.
Footnote 39: [(return)]
Brief Statement of the Rise and Progress of the Testimony of the Religious Society of Friends against Slavery and the Slave-Trade, 8.
Footnote 40: [(return)]
Russell: The Free Negro in Virginia, 138-9.
Footnote 41: [(return)]
Ibid., 138.
Footnote 42: [(return)]
C.E. Pierre, in Journal of Negro History, October, 1916, p. 350.
Footnote 43: [(return)]
See documents, "Eighteenth Century Slave Advertisements," Journal of Negro History, April, 1916, 163-216.
Footnote 44: [(return)]
Quoted from Williams: Centennial Oration, "The American Negro from 1776 to 1876," 10.
Footnote 45: [(return)]
See Rules for the Society of Negroes, 1693, by Cotton Mather, reprinted, New York, 1888, by George H. Moore.
Footnote 46: [(return)]
Holland: A Refutation of Calumnies, 63.
Footnote 47: [(return)]
Holland: A Refutation of Calumnies, 68.
Footnote 48: [(return)]
Coffin.
Footnote 49: [(return)]
The following account follows mainly Holland, quoting Hewitt.
Footnote 50: [(return)]
The sole authority on the plot is "A Journal of the Proceedings in the Detection of the Conspiracy formed by Some White People, in Conjunction with Negro and other Slaves, for Burning the City of New York in America, and Murdering the Inhabitants (by Judge Daniel Horsemanden). New York, 1744."
CHAPTER III
THE REVOLUTIONARY ERA
1. [Sentiment in England and America]
The materialism of the eighteenth century, with all of its evils, at length produced a liberalism of thought that was to shake to their very foundations old systems of life in both Europe and America. The progress of the cause of the Negro in this period is to be explained by the general diffusion of ideas that made for the rights of man everywhere. Cowper wrote his humanitarian poems; in close association with the romanticism of the day the missionary movement in religion began to gather force; and the same impulse which in England began the agitation for a free press and for parliamentary reform, and which in France accounted for the French Revolution, in America led to the revolt from Great Britain. No patriot could come under the influence of any one of these movements without having his heart and his sense of justice stirred to some degree in behalf of the slave. At the same time it must be remembered that the contest of the Americans was primarily for the definite legal rights of Englishmen rather than for the more abstract rights of mankind which formed the platform of the French Revolution; hence arose the great inconsistency in the position of men who were engaged in a stern struggle for liberty at the same time that they themselves were holding human beings in bondage.
In England the new era was formally signalized by an epoch-making decision. In November, 1769, Charles Stewart, once a merchant in Norfolk and later receiver general of the customs of North America, took to England his Negro slave, James Somerset, who, being sick, was turned adrift by his master. Later Somerset recovered and Stewart seized him, intending to have him borne out of the country and sold in Jamaica. Somerset objected to this and in so doing raised the important legal question, Did a slave by being brought to England become free? The case received an extraordinary amount of attention, for everybody realized that the decision would be far-reaching in its consequences. After it was argued at three different sittings, Lord Mansfield, Chief Justice of England, in 1772 handed down from the Court of King's Bench the judgment that as soon as ever any slave set his foot upon the soil of England he became free.
This decision may be taken as fairly representative of the general advance that the cause of the Negro was making in England at the time. Early in the century sentiment against the slave-trade had begun to develop, many pamphlets on the evils of slavery were circulated, and as early as 1776 a motion for the abolition of the trade was made in the House of Commons. John Wesley preached against the system, Adam Smith showed its ultimate expensiveness, and Burke declared that the slavery endured by the Negroes in the English settlements was worse than that ever suffered by any other people. Foremost in the work of protest were Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce, the one being the leader in investigation and in the organization of the movement against slavery while the other was the parliamentary champion of the cause. For years, assisted by such debaters as Burke, Fox, and the younger Pitt, Wilberforce worked until on March 25, 1807, the bill for the abolition of the slave-trade received the royal assent, and still later until slavery itself was abolished in the English dominions (1833).
This high thought in England necessarily found some reflection in America, where the logic of the position of the patriots frequently forced them to take up the cause of the slave. As early as 1751 Benjamin Franklin, in his Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind, pointed out the evil effects of slavery upon population and the production of wealth; and in 1761 James Otis, in his argument against the Writs of Assistance, spoke so vigorously of the rights of black men as to leave no doubt as to his own position. To Patrick Henry slavery was a practice "totally repugnant to the first impressions of right and wrong," and in 1777 he was interested in a plan for gradual emancipation received from his friend, Robert Pleasants. Washington desired nothing more than "to see some plan adopted by which slavery might be abolished by law"; while Joel Barlow in his Columbiad gave significant warning to Columbia of the ills that she was heaping up for herself.
Two of the expressions of sentiment of the day, by reason of their deep yearning and philosophic calm, somehow stand apart from others. Thomas Jefferson in his Notes on Virginia wrote: "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 submission on the other.... The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.... I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice can not sleep forever; that considering numbers, nature, and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events; that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest."[51] Henry Laurens, that fine patriot whose business sense was excelled only by his idealism, was harassed by the problem and wrote to his son, Colonel John Laurens, as follows: "You know, my dear son, I abhor slavery. I was born in a country where slavery had been established by British kings and parliaments, as well as by the laws of that country ages before my existence. I found the Christian religion and slavery growing under the same authority and cultivation. I nevertheless disliked it. In former days there was no combating the prejudices of men supported by interest; the day I hope is approaching when, from principles of gratitude as well as justice, every man will strive to be foremost in showing his readiness to comply with the golden rule. Not less than twenty thousand pounds sterling would all my Negroes produce if sold at public auction to-morrow. I am not the man who enslaved them; they are indebted to Englishmen for that favor; nevertheless I am devising means for manumitting many of them, and for cutting off the entail of slavery. Great powers oppose me—the laws and customs of my country, my own and the avarice of my countrymen. What will my children say if I deprive them of so much estate? These are difficulties, but not insuperable. I will do as much as I can in my time, and leave the rest to a better hand."[52] Stronger than all else, however, were the immortal words of the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Within the years to come these words were to be denied and assailed as perhaps no others in the language; but in spite of all they were to stand firm and justify the faith of 1776 before Jefferson himself and others had become submerged in a gilded opportunism.
It is not to be supposed that such sentiments were by any means general; nevertheless these instances alone show that some men at least in the colonies were willing to carry their principles to their logical conclusion. Naturally opinion crystallized in formal resolutions or enactments. Unfortunately most of these were in one way or another rendered ineffectual after the war; nevertheless the main impulse that they represented continued to live. In 1769 Virginia declared that the discriminatory tax levied on free Negroes and mulattoes since 1668 was "derogatory to the rights of freeborn subjects" and accordingly should be repealed. In October, 1774, the First Continental Congress declared in its Articles of Association that the united colonies would "neither import nor purchase any slave imported after the first day of December next" and that they would "wholly discontinue the trade." On April 16, 1776, the Congress further resolved that "no slaves be imported into any of the thirteen colonies"; and the first draft of the Declaration of Independence contained a strong passage censuring the King of England for bringing slaves into the country and then inciting them to rise against their masters. On April 14, 1775, the first abolition society in the country was organized in Pennsylvania; in 1778 Virginia once more passed an act prohibiting the slave-trade; and the Methodist Conference in Baltimore in 1780 strongly expressed its disapproval of slavery.
2. [The Negro in the War]
As in all the greater wars in which the country has engaged, the position of the Negro was generally improved by the American Revolution. It was not by reason of any definite plan that this was so, for in general the disposition of the government was to keep him out of the conflict. Nevertheless between the hesitating policy of America and the overtures of England the Negro made considerable advance.
The American cause in truth presented a strange and embarrassing dilemma, as we have remarked. In the war itself, moreover, began the stern cleavage between the North and the South. At the moment the rift was not clearly discerned, but afterwards it was to widen into a chasm. Massachusetts bore more than her share of the struggle, and in the South the combination of Tory sentiment and the aristocratic social system made enlistment especially difficult. In this latter section, moreover, there was always the lurking fear of an uprising of the slaves, and before the end of the war came South Carolina and Georgia were very nearly demoralized. In the course of the conflict South Carolina lost not less than 25,000 slaves,[53] about one-fifth of all she had. Georgia did not lose so many, but proportionally suffered even more. Some of the Negroes went into the British army, some went away with the loyalists, and some took advantage of the confusion and escaped to the Indians. In Virginia, until they were stopped at least, some slaves entered the Continental Army as free Negroes.
Three or four facts are outstanding. The formal policy of Congress and of Washington and his officers was against the enlistment of Negroes and especially of slaves; nevertheless, while things were still uncertain, some Negroes entered the regular units. The inducements offered by the English, moreover, forced a modification of the American policy in actual operation; and before the war was over the colonists were so hard pressed that in more ways than one they were willing to receive the assistance of Negroes. Throughout the North Negroes served in the regular units; but while in the South especially there was much thought given to the training of slaves, in only one of all the colonies was there a distinctively Negro military organization, and that one was Rhode Island. In general it was understood that if a slave served in the war he was to be given his freedom, and it is worthy of note that many slaves served in the field instead of their masters.
In Massachusetts on May 29, 1775, the Committee of Safety passed an act against the enlistment of slaves as "inconsistent with the principles that are to be supported." Another resolution of June 6 dealing with the same matter was laid on the table. Washington took command of the forces in and about Boston July 3, 1775, and on July 10 issued instructions to the recruiting officers in Massachusetts against the enlisting of Negroes. Toward the end of September there was a spirited debate in Congress over a letter to go to Washington, the Southern delegates, led by Rutledge of South Carolina, endeavoring to force instructions to the commander-in-chief to discharge all slaves and free Negroes in the army. A motion to this effect failed to win a majority; nevertheless, a council of Washington and his generals on October 8 "agreed unanimously to reject all slaves, and, by a great majority, to reject Negroes altogether," and in his general orders of November 12 Washington acted on this understanding. Meanwhile, however, Lord Dunmore issued his proclamation declaring free those indentured servants and Negroes who would join the English army, and in great numbers the slaves in Virginia flocked to the British standard. Then on December 14—somewhat to the amusement of both the Negroes and the English—the Virginia Convention issued a proclamation offering pardon to those slaves who returned to their duty within ten days. On December 30 Washington gave instructions for the enlistment of free Negroes, promising later to lay the matter before Congress; and a congressional committee on January 16, 1776, reported that those free Negroes who had already served faithfully in the army at Cambridge might reënlist but no others, the debate in this connection having drawn very sharply the line between the North and the South. Henceforth for all practical purposes the matter was left in the hands of the individual colonies. Massachusetts on January 6, 1777, passed a resolution drafting every seventh man to complete her quota "without any exception, save the people called Quakers," and this was as near as she came at any time in the war to the formal recognition of the Negro. The Rhode Island Assembly in 1778 resolved to raise a regiment of slaves, who were to be freed at enlistment, their owners in no case being paid more than £120. In the Battle of Rhode Island August 29, 1778, the Negro regiment under Colonel Greene distinguished itself by deeds of desperate valor, repelling three times the assaults of an overwhelming force of Hessian troops. A little later, when Greene was about to be murdered, some of these same soldiers had to be cut to pieces before he could be secured. Maryland employed Negroes as soldiers and sent them into regiments along with white men, and it is to be remembered that at the time the Negro population of Maryland was exceeded only by that of Virginia and South Carolina. For the far South there was the famous Laurens plan for the raising of Negro regiments.
In a letter to Washington of March 16, 1779, Henry Laurens suggested the raising and training of three thousand Negroes in South Carolina. Washington was rather conservative about the plan, having in mind the ever-present fear of the arming of Negroes and wondering about the effect on those slaves who were not given a chance for freedom. On June 30, 1779, however, Sir Henry Clinton issued a proclamation only less far-reaching than Dunmore's, threatening Negroes if they joined the "rebel" army and offering them security if they came within the British lines. This was effective; assistance of any kind that the Continental Army could now get was acceptable; and the plan for the raising of several battalions of Negroes in the South was entrusted to Colonel John Laurens, a member of Washington's staff. In his own way Colonel Laurens was a man of parts quite as well as his father; he was thoroughly devoted to the American cause and Washington said of him that his only fault was a courage that bordered on rashness. He eagerly pursued his favorite project; able-bodied slaves were to be paid for by Congress at the rate of $1,000 each, and one who served to the end of the war was to receive his freedom and $50 in addition. In South Carolina, however, Laurens received little encouragement, and in 1780 he was called upon to go to France on a patriotic mission. He had not forgotten the matter when he returned in 1782; but by that time Cornwallis had surrendered and the country had entered upon the critical period of adjustment to the new conditions. Washington now wrote to Laurens: "I must confess that I am not at all astonished at the failure of your plan. That spirit of freedom which, at the commencement of this contest, would have gladly sacrificed everything to the attainment of its object, has long since subsided, and every selfish passion has taken its place. It is not the public but private interest which influences the generality of mankind; nor can the Americans any longer boast an exception. Under these circumstances, it would rather have been surprising if you had succeeded; nor will you, I fear, have better success in Georgia."[54]
From this brief survey we may at least see something of the anomalous position occupied by the Negro in the American Revolution. Altogether not less than three thousand, and probably more, members of the race served in the Continental army. At the close of the conflict New York, Rhode Island, and Virginia freed their slave soldiers. In general, however, the system of slavery was not affected, and the English were bound by the treaty of peace not to carry away any Negroes. As late as 1786, it is nevertheless interesting to note, a band of Negroes calling themselves "The King of England's soldiers" harassed and alarmed the people on both sides of the Savannah River.
Slavery remained; but people could not forget the valor of the Negro regiment in Rhode Island, or the courage of individual soldiers. They could not forget that it was a Negro, Crispus Attucks, who had been the patriot leader in the Boston Massacre, or the scene when he and one of his companions, Jonas Caldwell, lay in Faneuil Hall. Those who were at Bunker Hill could not fail to remember Peter Salem, who, when Major Pitcairn of the British army was exulting in his expected triumph, rushed forward, shot him in the breast, and killed him; or Samuel Poor, whose officers testified that he performed so many brave deeds that "to set forth particulars of his conduct would be tedious." These and many more, some with very humble names, in a dark day worked for a better country. They died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off.
3. [The Northwest Territory and the Constitution]
The materialism and selfishness which rose in the course of the war to oppose the liberal tendencies of the period, and which Washington felt did so much to embarrass the government, became pronounced in the debates on the Northwest Territory and the Constitution. At the outbreak of the Revolutionary War the region west of Pennsylvania, east of the Mississippi River, north of the Ohio River, and south of Canada, was claimed by Virginia, New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. This territory afforded to these states a source of revenue not possessed by the others for the payment of debts incurred in the war, and Maryland and other seaboard states insisted that in order to equalize matters these claimants should cede their rights to the general government. The formal cessions were made and accepted in the years 1782-6. In April, 1784, after Virginia had made her cession, the most important, Congress adopted a temporary form of government drawn up by Thomas Jefferson for the territory south as well as north of the Ohio River. Jefferson's most significant provision, however, was rejected. This declared that "after the year 1800 there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of the said states other than in the punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted to have been personally guilty." This early ordinance, although it did not go into effect, is interesting as an attempt to exclude slavery from the great West that was beginning to be opened up. On March 3, 1786, moreover, the Ohio Company was formed in Boston by a group of New England business men for the purpose of purchasing land in the West and promoting settlement; and early in June, 1787, Dr. Manasseh Cutler, one of the chief promoters of the company, appeared in New York, where the last Continental Congress was sitting, for the concrete purpose of buying land. He doubtless did much to hasten action by Congress, and on July 13 was passed "An Ordinance for the Government of the Territory of the United States, Northwest of the Ohio," the Southern states not having ceded the area south of the river. It was declared that "There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory, otherwise than in punishment of crimes, whereof the parties shall be duly convicted." To this was added the stipulation (soon afterwards embodied in the Federal Constitution) for the return of any person escaping into the territory from whom labor or service was "lawfully claimed in any one of the original states." In this shape the ordinance was adopted, even South Carolina and Georgia concurring; and thus was paved the way for the first fugitive slave law.
Slavery, already looming up as a dominating issue, was the cause of two of the three great compromises that entered into the making of the Constitution of the United States (the third, which was the first made, being the concession to the smaller states of equal representation in the Senate). These were the first but not the last of the compromises that were to mark the history of the subject; and, as some clear-headed men of the time perceived, it would have been better and cheaper to settle the question at once on the high plane of right rather than to leave it indefinitely to the future. South Carolina, however, with able representation, largely controlled the thought of the convention, and she and Georgia made the most extreme demands, threatening not to accept the Constitution if there was not compliance with them. An important question was that of representation, the Southern states advocating representation according to numbers, slave and free, while the Northern states were in favor of the representation of free persons only. Williamson of North Carolina advocated the counting of three-fifths of the slaves, but this motion was at first defeated, and there was little real progress until Gouverneur Morris suggested that representation be according to the principle of wealth. Mason of Virginia pointed out practical difficulties which caused the resolution to be made to apply to direct taxation only, and in this form it began to be generally acceptable. By this time, however, the deeper feelings of the delegates on the subject of slavery had been stirred, and they began to speak plainly. Davie of North Carolina declared that his state would never enter the Union on any terms that did not provide for counting at least three-fifths of the slaves and that "if the Eastern states meant to exclude them altogether the business was at an end." It was finally agreed to reckon three-fifths of the slaves in estimating taxes and to make taxation the basis of representation. The whole discussion was renewed, however, in connection with the question of importation. There were more threats from the far South, and some of the men from New England, prompted by commercial interest, even if they did not favor the sentiments expressed, were at least disposed to give them passive acquiescence. From Maryland and Virginia, however, came earnest protest. Luther Martin declared unqualifiedly that to have a clause in the Constitution permitting the importation of slaves was inconsistent with the principles of the Revolution and dishonorable to the American character, and George Mason could foresee only a future in which a just Providence would punish such a national sin as slavery by national calamities. Such utterances were not to dominate the convention, however; it was a day of expediency, not of morality. A bargain was made between the commercial interests of the North and the slave-holding interests of the South, the granting to Congress of unrestricted power to enact navigation laws being conceded in exchange for twenty years' continuance of the slave-trade. The main agreements on the subject of slavery were thus finally expressed in the Constitution: "Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this Union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to servitude for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three-fifths of all other persons" (Art. I, Sec. 2); "The migration or importation of such persons as any of the states now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the congress prior to the year 1808; but a tax or duty may be imposed, not exceeding ten dollars on each person" (Art. I, Sec. 9); "No person held to service or labor in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due" (Art. IV, Sec. 2). With such provisions, though without the use of the question-begging word slaves, the institution of human bondage received formal recognition in the organic law of the new republic of the United States.
"Just what is the light in which we are to regard the slaves?" wondered James Wilson in the course of the debate. "Are they admitted as citizens?" he asked; "then why are they not admitted on an equality with white citizens? Are they admitted as property? then why is not other property admitted into the computation?" Such questions and others to which they gave rise were to trouble more heads than his in the course of the coming years, and all because a great nation did not have the courage to do the right thing at the right time.
4. [Early Steps toward Abolition]
In spite, however, of the power crystallized in the Constitution, the moral movement that had set in against slavery still held its ground, and it was destined never wholly to languish until slavery ceased altogether to exist in the United States. Throughout the century the Quakers continued their good work; in the generation before the war John Woolman of New Jersey traveled in the Southern colonies preaching that "the practice of continuing slavery is not right"; and Anthony Benezet opened in Philadelphia a school for Negroes which he himself taught without remuneration, and otherwise influenced Pennsylvania to begin the work of emancipation. In general the Quakers conducted their campaign along the lines on which they were most likely to succeed, attacking the slave-trade first of all but more and more making an appeal to the central government; and the first Abolition Society, organized in Pennsylvania in 1775 and consisting mainly of Quakers, had for its original object merely the relief of free Negroes unlawfully held in bondage.[55] The organization was forced to suspend its work in the course of the war, but in 1784 it renewed its meetings, and men of other denominations than the Quakers now joined in greater numbers. In 1787 the society was formally reorganized as "The Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, the Relief of Free Negroes unlawfully held in Bondage, and for Improving the Condition of the African Race." Benjamin Franklin was elected president and there was adopted a constitution which was more and more to serve as a model for similar societies in the neighboring states.
Four years later, by 1791, there were in the country as many as twelve abolition societies, and these represented all the states from Massachusetts to Virginia, with the exception of New Jersey, where a society was formed the following year. That of New York, formed in 1785 with John Jay as president, took the name of the Manumission Society, limiting its aims at first to promoting manumission and protecting those Negroes who had already been set free. All of the societies had very clear ideas as to their mission. The prevalence of kidnaping made them emphasize "the relief of free Negroes unlawfully held in bondage," and in general each one in addition to its executive committee had committees for inspection, advice, and protection; for the guardianship of children; for the superintending of education, and for employment. While the societies were originally formed to attend to local matters, their efforts naturally extended in course of time to national affairs, and on December 8, 1791, nine of them prepared petitions to Congress for the limitation of the slave-trade. These petitions were referred to a special committee and nothing more was heard of them at the time. After two years accordingly the organizations decided that a more vigorous plan of action was necessary, and on January 1, 1794, delegates from nine societies organized in Philadelphia the American Convention of Abolition Societies. The object of the Convention was twofold, "to increase the zeal and efficiency of the individual societies by its advice and encouragement ... and to take upon itself the chief responsibility in regard to national affairs." It prepared an address to the country and presented to Congress a memorial against the fitting out of vessels in the United States to engage in the slave-trade, and it had the satisfaction of seeing Congress in the same year pass a bill to this effect.
Some of the organizations were very active and one as far South as that in Maryland was at first very powerful. Always were they interested in suits in courts of law. In 1797 the New York Society reported 90 complaints, 36 persons freed, 21 cases still in suit, and 19 under consideration. The Pennsylvania Society reported simply that it had been instrumental in the liberation of "many hundreds" of persons. The different branches, however, did not rest with mere liberation; they endeavored generally to improve the condition of the Negroes in their respective communities, each one being expected to report to the Convention on the number of freedmen in its state and on their property, employment, and conduct. From time to time also the Convention prepared addresses to these people, and something of the spirit of its work and also of the social condition of the Negro at the time may be seen from the following address of 1796:
To the Free Africans and Other Free People of Color in the United States.
The Convention of Deputies from the Abolition Societies in the United States, assembled at Philadelphia, have undertaken to address you upon subjects highly interesting to your prosperity.
They wish to see you act worthily of the rank you have acquired as freemen, and thereby to do credit to yourselves, and to justify the friends and advocates of your color in the eyes of the world.
As the result of our united reflections, we have concluded to call your attention to the following articles of advice. We trust they are dictated by the purest regard for your welfare, for we view you as Friends and Brethren.
In the first place, We earnestly recommend to you, a regular attention to the important duty of public worship; by which means you will evince gratitude to your Creator, and, at the same time, promote knowledge, union, friendship, and proper conduct among yourselves.
Secondly, We advise such of you, as have not been taught reading, writing, and the first principles of arithmetic, to acquire them as early as possible. Carefully attend to the instruction of your children in the same simple and useful branches of education. Cause them, likewise, early and frequently to read the holy Scriptures; these contain, amongst other great discoveries, the precious record of the original equality of mankind, and of the obligations of universal justice and benevolence, which are derived from the relation of the human race to each other in a common Father.
Thirdly, Teach your children useful trades, or to labor with their hands in cultivating the earth. These employments are favorable to health and virtue. In the choice of masters, who are to instruct them in the above branches of business, prefer those who will work with them; by this means they will acquire habits of industry, and be better preserved from vice than if they worked alone, or under the eye of persons less interested in their welfare. In forming contracts, for yourselves or children, with masters, it may be useful to consult such persons as are capable of giving you the best advice, and who are known to be your friends, in order to prevent advantages being taken of your ignorance of the laws and customs of our country.
Fourthly, Be diligent in your respective callings, and faithful in all the relations you bear in society, whether as husbands, wives, fathers, children or hired servants. Be just in all your dealings. Be simple in your dress and furniture, and frugal in your family expenses. Thus you will act like Christians as well as freemen, and, by these means, you will provide for the distresses and wants of sickness and old age.
Fifthly, Refrain from the use of spirituous liquors; the experience of many thousands of the citizens of the United States has proved that these liquors are not necessary to lessen the fatigue of labor, nor to obviate the effects of heat or cold; nor can they, in any degree, add to the innocent pleasures of society.
Sixthly, Avoid frolicking, and amusements which lead to expense and idleness; they beget habits of dissipation and vice, and thus expose you to deserved reproach amongst your white neighbors.
Seventhly, We wish to impress upon your minds the moral and religious necessity of having your marriages legally performed; also to have exact registers preserved of all the births and deaths which occur in your respective families.
Eighthly, Endeavor to lay up as much as possible of your earnings for the benefit of your children, in case you should die before they are able to maintain themselves—your money will be safest and most beneficial when laid out in lots, houses, or small farms.
Ninthly, We recommend to you, at all times and upon all occasions, to behave yourselves to all persons in a civil and respectful manner, by which you may prevent contention and remove every just occasion of complaint. We beseech you to reflect, that it is by your good conduct alone that you can refute the objections which have been made against you as rational and moral creatures, and remove many of the difficulties which have occurred in the general emancipation of such of your brethren as are yet in bondage.
With hearts anxious for your welfare, we commend you to the guidance and protection of that Being who is able to keep you from all evil, and who is the common Father and Friend of the whole family of mankind.
Theodore Foster, President. Philadelphia, January 6th, 1796. Thomas P. Cope, Secretary.
The general impulse for liberty which prompted the Revolution and the early Abolition societies naturally found some reflection in formal legislation. The declarations of the central government under the Confederation were not very effective, and for more definite enactments we have to turn to the individual states. The honor of being the first actually to prohibit and abolish slavery really belongs to Vermont, whose constitution, adopted in 1777, even before she had come into the Union, declared very positively against the system. In 1782 the old Virginia statute forbidding emancipation except for meritorious services was repealed. The repeal was in force ten years, and in this time manumissions were numerous. Maryland soon afterwards passed acts similar to those in Virginia prohibiting the further introduction of slaves and removing restraints on emancipation, and New York and New Jersey also prohibited the further introduction of slaves from Africa or from other states. In 1780, in spite of considerable opposition because of the course of the war, the Pennsylvania Assembly passed an act forbidding the further introduction of slaves and giving freedom to all persons thereafter born in the state. Similar provisions were enacted in Connecticut and Rhode Island in 1784. Meanwhile Massachusetts was much agitated, and beginning in 1766 there were before the courts several cases in which Negroes sued for their freedom.[56] Their general argument was that the royal charter declared that all persons residing in the province were to be as free as the king's subjects in Great Britain, that by Magna Carta no subject could be deprived of liberty except by the judgment of his peers, and that any laws that may have been passed in the province to mitigate or regulate the evil of slavery did not authorize it. Sometimes the decisions were favorable, but at the beginning of the Revolution Massachusetts still recognized the system by the decision that no slave could be enlisted in the army. In 1777, however, some slaves brought from Jamaica were ordered to be set at liberty, and it was finally decided in 1783 that the declaration in the Massachusetts Bill of Rights to the effect that "all men are born free and equal" prohibited slavery. In this same year New Hampshire incorporated in her constitution a prohibitive article. By the time the convention for the framing of the Constitution of the United States met in Philadelphia in 1787, two of the original thirteen states (Massachusetts and New Hampshire) had positively prohibited slavery, and in three others (Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Rhode Island) gradual abolition was in progress.
The next decade was largely one of the settlement of new territory, and by its close the pendulum seemed to have swung decidedly backward. In 1799, however, after much effort and debating, New York at last declared for gradual abolition, and New Jersey did likewise in 1804. In general, gradual emancipation was the result of the work of people who were humane but also conservative and who questioned the wisdom of thrusting upon the social organism a large number of Negroes suddenly emancipated. Sometimes, however, a gradual emancipation act was later followed by one for immediate manumission, as in New York in 1817. At first those who favored gradual emancipation were numerous in the South as well as in the North, but in general after Gabriel's insurrection in 1800, though some individuals were still outstanding, the South was quiescent. The character of the acts that were really put in force can hardly be better stated than has already been done by the specialist in the subject.[57] We read:
Gradual emancipation is defined as the extinction of slavery by depriving it of its hereditary quality. In distinction from the clauses in the constitutions of Vermont, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, which directly or indirectly affected the condition of slavery as already existing, the gradual emancipation acts left this condition unchanged and affected only the children born after the passage of the act or after a fixed date. Most of these acts followed that of Pennsylvania in providing that the children of a slave mother should remain with her owner as servants until they reached a certain age, of from twenty-one to twenty-eight years, as stated in the various enactments. In Pennsylvania, however, they were to be regarded as free. In Connecticut, on the other hand, they were to be "held in servitude" until twenty-five years of age and after that to be free. The most liberal policy was that of Rhode Island, where the children were pronounced free but were to be supported by the town and educated in reading, writing, and arithmetic, morality and religion. The latter clauses, however, were repealed the following year, leaving the children to be supported by the owner of the mother until twenty-one years of age, and only if he abandoned his claims to the mother to become a charge to the town. In New York and New Jersey they were to remain as servants until a certain age, but were regarded as free, and liberal opportunities were given the master for the abandonment of his claims, the children in such cases to be supported at the common charge.... The manumission and emancipation acts were naturally followed, as in the case of the constitutional provision in Vermont, by the attempts of some of the slave-owners to dispose of their property outside the State. Amendments to the laws were found necessary, and the Abolition Societies found plenty of occasion for their exertions in protecting free blacks from seizure and illegal sale and in looking after the execution and amendment of the laws. The process of gradual emancipation was also unsatisfactory on account of the length of time it would require, and in Pennsylvania and Connecticut attempts were made to obtain acts for immediate emancipation.
5. [Beginning of Racial Consciousness]
Of supreme importance in this momentous period, more important perhaps in its ultimate effect than even the work of the Abolition Societies, was what the Negro was doing for himself. In the era of the Revolution began that racial consciousness on which almost all later effort for social betterment has been based.
By 1700 the only coöperative effort on the part of the Negro was such as that in the isolated society to which Cotton Mather gave rules, or in a spasmodic insurrection, or a rather crude development of native African worship. As yet there was no genuine basis of racial self-respect. In one way or another, however, in the eighteenth century the idea of association developed, and especially in Boston about the time of the Revolution Negroes began definitely to work together; thus they assisted individuals in test cases in the courts, and when James Swan in his Dissuasion from the Slave Trade made such a statement as that "no country can be called free where there is one slave," it was "at the earnest desire of the Negroes in Boston" that the revised edition of the pamphlet was published.
From the very beginning the Christian Church was the race's foremost form of social organization. It was but natural that the first distinctively Negro churches should belong to the democratic Baptist denomination. There has been much discussion as to which was the very first Negro Baptist church, and good claims have been put forth by the Harrison Street Baptist Church of Petersburg, Va., and for a church in Williamsburg, Va., organization in each case going back to 1776. A student of the subject, however, has shown that there was a Negro Baptist church at Silver Bluff, "on the South Carolina side of the Savannah River, in Aiken County, just twelve miles from Augusta, Ga.," founded not earlier than 1773, not later than 1775.[58] In any case special interest attaches to the First Bryan Baptist Church, of Savannah, founded in January, 1788. The origin of this body goes back to George Liele, a Negro born in Virginia, who might justly lay claim to being America's first foreign missionary. Converted by a Georgia Baptist minister, he was licensed as a probationer and was known to preach soon afterwards at a white quarterly meeting.[59] In 1783 he preached in the vicinity of Savannah, and one of those who came to hear him was Andrew Bryan, a slave of Jonathan Bryan. Liele then went to Jamaica and in 1784 began to preach in Kingston, where with four brethren from America he formed a church. At first he was subjected to persecution; nevertheless by 1791 he had baptized over four hundred persons. Eight or nine months after he left for Jamaica, Andrew Bryan began to preach, and at first he was permitted to use a building at Yamacraw, in the suburbs of Savannah. Of this, however, he was in course of time dispossessed, the place being a rendezvous for those Negroes who had been taken away from their homes by the British. Many of these men were taken before the magistrates from time to time, and some were whipped and others imprisoned. Bryan himself, having incurred the ire of the authorities, was twice imprisoned and once publicly whipped, being so cut that he "bled abundantly"; but he told his persecutors that he "would freely suffer death for the cause of Jesus Christ," and after a while he was permitted to go on with his work. For some time he used a barn, being assisted by his brother Sampson; then for £50 he purchased his freedom, and afterwards he began to use for worship a house that Sampson had been permitted to erect. By 1791 his church had two hundred members, but over a hundred more had been received as converted members though they had not won their masters' permission to be baptized. An interesting sidelight on these people is furnished by the statement that probably fifty of them could read though only three could write. Years afterwards, in 1832, when the church had grown to great numbers, a large part of the congregation left the Bryan Church and formed what is now the First African Baptist Church of Savannah. Both congregations, however, remembered their early leader as one "clear in the grand doctrines of the Gospel, truly pious, and the instrument of doing more good among the poor slaves than all the learned doctors in America."
While Bryan was working in Savannah, in Richmond, Va., rose Lott Cary, a man of massive and erect frame and of great personality. Born a slave in 1780, Cary worked for a number of years in a tobacco factory, leading a wicked life. Converted in 1807, he made rapid advance in education and he was licensed as a Baptist preacher. He purchased his own freedom and that of his children (his first wife having died), organized a missionary society, and then in 1821 himself went as a missionary to the new colony of Liberia, in whose interest he worked heroically until his death in 1828.
More clearly defined than the origin of Negro Baptist churches are the beginnings of African Methodism. Almost from the time of its introduction in the country Methodism made converts among the Negroes and in 1786 there were nearly two thousand Negroes in the regular churches of the denomination, which, like the Baptist denomination, it must be remembered, was before the Revolution largely overshadowed in official circles by the Protestant Episcopal Church. The general embarrassment of the Episcopal Church in America in connection with the war, and the departure of many loyalist ministers, gave opportunity to other denominations as well as to certain bodies of Negroes. The white members of St. George's Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, however, determined to set apart its Negro membership and to segregate it in the gallery. Then in 1787 came a day when the Negroes, choosing not to be insulted, and led by Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, left the edifice, and with these two men as overseers on April 17 organized the Free African Society. This was intended to be "without regard to religious tenets," the members being banded together "to support one another in sickness and for the benefit of their widows and fatherless children." The society was in the strictest sense fraternal, there being only eight charter members: Absalom Jones, Richard Allen, Samuel Boston, Joseph Johnson, Cato Freeman, Cæsar Cranchell, James Potter, and William White. By 1790 the society had on deposit in the Bank of North America £42 9s. id., and that it generally stood for racial enterprise may be seen from the fact that in 1788 an organization in Newport known as the Negro Union, in which Paul Cuffe was prominent, wrote proposing a general exodus of the Negroes to Africa. Nothing came of the suggestion at the time, but at least it shows that representative Negroes of the day were beginning to think together about matters of general policy.
In course of time the Free African Society of Philadelphia resolved into an "African Church," and this became affiliated with the Protestant Episcopal Church, whose bishop had exercised an interest in it. Out of this organization developed St. Thomas's Episcopal Church, organized in 1791 and formally opened for service July 17, 1794. Allen was at first selected for ordination, but he decided to remain a Methodist and Jones was chosen in his stead and thus became the first Negro rector in the United States. Meanwhile, however, in 1791, Allen himself had purchased a lot at the corner of Sixth and Lombard Streets; he at once set about arranging for the building that became Bethel Church; and in 1794 he formally sold the lot to the church and the new house of worship was dedicated by Bishop Asbury of the Methodist Episcopal Church. With this general body Allen and his people for a number of years remained affiliated, but difficulties arose and separate churches having come into being in other places, a convention of Negro Methodists was at length called to meet in Philadelphia April 9, 1816. To this came sixteen delegates—Richard Allen, Jacob Tapsico, Clayton Durham, James Champion, Thomas Webster, of Philadelphia; Daniel Coker, Richard Williams, Henry Harden, Stephen Hill, Edward Williamson, Nicholas Gailliard, of Baltimore: Jacob Marsh, Edward Jackson, William Andrew, of Attleborough, Penn.; Peter Spencer, of Wilmington, Del., and Peter Cuffe, of Salem, N.J.—and these were the men who founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Coker, of whom we shall hear more in connection with Liberia, was elected bishop, but resigned in favor of Allen, who served until his death in 1831.
In 1796 a congregation in New York consisting of James Varick and others also withdrew from the main body of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and in 1800 dedicated a house of worship. For a number of years it had the oversight of the older organization, but after preliminary steps in 1820, on June 21, 1821, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church was formally organized. To the first conference came 19 preachers representing 6 churches and 1,426 members. Varick was elected district chairman, but soon afterwards was made bishop. The polity of this church from the first differed somewhat from that of the A.M.E. denomination in that representation of the laity was a prominent feature and there was no bar to the ordination of women.
Of denominations other than the Baptist and the Methodist, the most prominent in the earlier years was the Presbyterian, whose first Negro ministers were John Gloucester and John Chavis. Gloucester owed his training to the liberal tendencies that about 1800 were still strong in eastern Tennessee and Kentucky, and in 1810 took charge of the African Presbyterian Church which in 1807 had been established in Philadelphia. He was distinguished by a rich musical voice and the general dignity of his life, and he himself became the father of four Presbyterian ministers. Chavis had a very unusual career. After passing "through a regular course of academic studies" at Washington Academy, now Washington and Lee University, in 1801 he was commissioned by the General Assembly of the Presbyterians as a missionary to the Negroes. He worked with increasing reputation until Nat Turner's insurrection caused the North Carolina legislature in 1832 to pass an act silencing all Negro preachers. Then in Wake County and elsewhere he conducted schools for white boys until his death in 1838. In these early years distinction also attaches to Lemuel Haynes, a Revolutionary patriot and the first Negro preacher of the Congregational denomination. In 1785 he became the pastor of a white congregation in Torrington, Conn., and in 1818 began to serve another in Manchester, N.H.
After the church the strongest organization among Negroes has undoubtedly been that of secret societies commonly known as "lodges." The benefit societies were not necessarily secret and call for separate consideration. On March 6, 1775, an army lodge attached to one of the regiments stationed under General Gage in or near Boston initiated Prince Hall and fourteen other colored men into the mysteries of Freemasonry.[60] These fifteen men on March 2, 1784, applied to the Grand Lodge of England for a warrant. This was issued to "African Lodge, No. 459," with Prince Hall as master, September 29, 1784. Various delays and misadventures befell the warrant, however, so that it was not actually received before April 29, 1787. The lodge was then duly organized May 6. From this beginning developed the idea of Masonry among the Negroes of America. As early as 1792 Hall was formally styled Grand Master, and in 1797 he issued a license to thirteen Negroes to "assemble and work" as a lodge in Philadelphia; and there was also at this time a lodge in Providence. Thus developed in 1808 the "African Grand Lodge" of Boston, afterwards known as "Prince Hall Lodge of Massachusetts"; the second Grand Lodge, called the "First Independent African Grand Lodge of North America in and for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania," organized in 1815; and the "Hiram Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania."
Something of the interest of the Masons in their people, and the calm judgment that characterized their procedure, may be seen from the words of their leader, Prince Hall.[61] Speaking in 1797, and having in mind the revolution in Hayti and recent indignities inflicted upon the race in Boston, he said:
When we hear of the bloody wars which are now in the world, and thousands of our fellowmen slain; fathers and mothers bewailing the loss of their sons; wives for the loss of their husbands; towns and cities burnt and destroyed; what must be the heartfelt sorrow and distress of these poor and unhappy people! Though we can not help them, the distance being so great, yet we may sympathize with them in their troubles, and mingle a tear of sorrow with them, and do as we are exhorted to—weep with those that weep....
Now, my brethren, as we see and experience that all things here are frail and changeable and nothing here to be depended upon: Let us seek those things which are above, which are sure and steadfast, and unchangeable, and at the same time let us pray to Almighty God, while we remain in the tabernacle, that he would give us the grace and patience and strength to bear up under all our troubles, which at this day God knows we have our share. Patience I say, for were we not possessed of a great measure of it you could not bear up under the daily insults you meet with in the streets of Boston; much more on public days of recreation, how are you shamefully abused, and that at such a degree, that you may truly be said to carry your lives in your hands; and the arrows of death are flying about your heads; helpless old women have their clothes torn off their backs, even to the exposing of their nakedness; and by whom are these disgraceful and abusive actions committed? Not by the men born and bred in Boston, for they are better bred; but by a mob or horde of shameless, low-lived, envious, spiteful persons, some of them not long since, servants in gentlemen's kitchens, scouring knives, tending horses, and driving chaise. 'Twas said by a gentleman who saw that filthy behavior in the Common, that in all the places he had been in he never saw so cruel behavior in all his life, and that a slave in the West Indies, on Sundays or holidays, enjoys himself and friends without molestation. Not only this man, but many in town who have seen their behavior to you, and that without any provocations twenty or thirty cowards fall upon one man, have wondered at the patience of the blacks; 'tis not for want of courage in you, for they know that they dare not face you man for man, but in a mob, which we despise, and had rather suffer wrong than do wrong, to the disturbance of the community and the disgrace of our reputation; for every good citizen does honor to the laws of the State where he resides....
My brethren, let us not be cast down under these and many other abuses we at present labor under: for the darkest is before the break of day. My brethren, let us remember what a dark day it was with our African brethren six years ago, in the French West Indies. Nothing but the snap of the whip was heard from morning to evening; hanging, breaking on the wheel, burning, and all manner of tortures inflicted on those unhappy people, for nothing else but to gratify their masters' pride, wantonness, and cruelty: but blessed be God, the scene is changed; they now confess that God hath no respect of persons, and therefore receive them as their friends, and treat them as brothers. Thus doth Ethiopia begin to stretch forth her hand, from a sink of slavery to freedom and equality.
An African Society was organized in New York in 1808 and chartered in 1810, and out of it grew in course of time three or four other organizations. Generally close to the social aim of the church and sometimes directly fathered by the secret societies were the benefit organizations, which even in the days of slavery existed for aid in sickness or at death; in fact, it was the hopelessness of the general situation coupled with the yearning for care when helpless that largely called these societies into being. Their origin has been explained somewhat as follows:
Although it was unlawful for Negroes to assemble without the presence of a white man, and so unlawful to allow a congregation of slaves on a plantation without the consent of the master, these organizations existed and held these meetings on the "lots" of some of the law-makers themselves. The general plan seems to have been to select some one who could read and write and make him the secretary. The meeting-place having been selected, the members would come by ones and twos, make their payments to the secretary, and quietly withdraw. The book of the secretary was often kept covered up on the bed. In many of the societies each member was known by number and in paying simply announced his number. The president of such a society was usually a privileged slave who had the confidence of his or her master and could go and come at will. Thus a form of communication could be kept up between all members. In event of death of a member, provision was made for decent burial, and all the members as far as possible obtained permits to attend the funeral. Here and again their plan of getting together was brought into play. In Richmond they would go to the church by ones and twos and there sit as near together as convenient. At the close of the service a line of march would be formed when sufficiently far from the church to make it safe to do so. It is reported that the members were faithful to each other and that every obligation was faithfully carried out. This was the first form of insurance known to the Negro from which his family received a benefit.[62]
All along of course a determining factor in the Negro's social progress was the service that he was able to render to any community in which he found himself as well as to his own people. Sometimes he was called upon to do very hard work, sometimes very unpleasant or dangerous work; but if he answered the call of duty and met an actual human need, his service had to receive recognition. An example of such work was found in his conduct in the course of the yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia in 1793. Knowing that fever in general was not quite as severe in its ravages upon Negroes as upon white people, the daily papers of Philadelphia called upon the colored people in the town to come forward and assist with the sick. The Negroes consented, and Absalom Jones and William Gray were appointed to superintend the operations, though as usual it was upon Richard Allen that much of the real responsibility fell. In September the fever increased and upon the Negroes devolved also the duty of removing corpses. In the course of their work they encountered much opposition; thus Jones said that a white man threatened to shoot him if he passed his house with a corpse. This man himself the Negroes had to bury three days afterwards. When the epidemic was over, under date January 23, 1794, Matthew Clarkson, the mayor, wrote the following testimonial: "Having, during the prevalence of the late malignant disorder, had almost daily opportunities of seeing the conduct of Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, and the people employed by them to bury the dead, I with cheerfulness give this testimony of my approbation of their proceedings, as far as the same came under my notice. Their diligence, attention, and decency of deportment, afforded me, at the time, much satisfaction." After the lapse of years it is with something of the pathos of martyrdom that we are impressed by the service of these struggling people, who by their self-abnegation and patriotism endeavored to win and deserve the privileges of American citizenship.
All the while, in one way or another, the Negro was making advance in education. As early as 1704 we have seen that Neau opened a school in New York; there was Benezet's school in Philadelphia before the Revolutionary War, and in 1798 one for Negroes was established in Boston. In the first part of the century, we remember also, some Negroes were apprenticed in Virginia under the oversight of the church. In 1764 the editor of a paper in Williamsburg, Va., established a school for Negroes, and we have seen that as many as one-sixth of the members of Andrew Bryan's congregation in the far Southern city of Savannah could read by 1790. Exceptional men, like Gloucester and Chavis, of course availed themselves of such opportunities as came their way. All told, by 1800 the Negro had received much more education than is commonly supposed.
Two persons—one in science and one in literature—because of their unusual attainments attracted much attention. The first was Benjamin Banneker of Maryland, and the second Phillis Wheatley of Boston. Banneker in 1770 constructed the first clock striking the hours that was made in America, and from 1792 to 1806 published an almanac adapted to Maryland and the neighboring states. He was thoroughly scholarly in mathematics and astronomy, and by his achievements won a reputation for himself in Europe as well as in America. Phillis Wheatley, after a romantic girlhood of transition from Africa to a favorable environment in Boston, in 1773 published her Poems on Various Subjects, which volume she followed with several interesting occasional poems.[63] For the summer of this year she was the guest in England of the Countess of Huntingdon, whose patronage she had won by an elegiac poem on George Whitefield; in conversation even more than in verse-making she exhibited her refined taste and accomplishment, and presents were showered upon her, one of them being a copy of the magnificent 1770 Glasgow folio edition of Paradise Lost, which was given by Brook Watson, Lord Mayor of London, and which is now preserved in the library of Harvard University. In the earlier years of the next century her poems found their way into the common school readers. One of those in her representative volume was addressed to Scipio Moorhead, a young Negro of Boston who had shown some talent for painting. Thus even in a dark day there were those who were trying to struggle upward to the light.
Footnote 51: [(return)]
"The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, issued under the auspices of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association," 20 vols., Washington, 1903, II, 226-227.
Footnote 52: [(return)]
"A South Carolina Protest against Slavery (being a letter written from Henry Laurens, second president of the Continental Congress, to his son, Colonel John Laurens; dated Charleston, S.C., August 14th, 1776)." Reprinted by G.P. Putnam, New York, 1861.
Footnote 53: [(return)]
Historical Notes on the Employment of Negroes in the American Army of the Revolution, by G.H. Moore, New York, 1862, p. 15.
Footnote 54: [(return)]
Sparks's Washington, VIII, 322-323.
Footnote 55: [(return)]
Locke: Anti-Slavery in America, 97.
Footnote 56: [(return)]
See Williams: History of the Negro Race in America, I, 228-236.
Footnote 57: [(return)]
Locke, 124-126.
Footnote 58: [(return)]
Walter H. Brooks: The Silver Bluff Church.
Footnote 59: [(return)]
See letters in Journal of Negro History, January, 1916, 69-97.
Footnote 60: [(return)]
William H. Upton: Negro Masonry, Cambridge, 1899, 10.
Footnote 61: [(return)]
"A Charge Delivered to the African Lodge, June 24, 1797, at Menotomy. By the Right Worshipful Prince Hall." (Boston?) 1797.
Footnote 62: [(return)]
Hampton Conference Report, No. 8
Footnote 63: [(return)]
For a full study see Chapter II of The Negro in Literature and Art.
CHAPTER IV
THE NEW WEST, THE SOUTH, AND THE WEST INDIES
The twenty years of the administrations of the first three presidents of the United States—or, we might say, the three decades between 1790 and 1820—constitute what might be considered the "Dark Ages" of Negro history; and yet, as with most "Dark Ages," at even a glance below the surface these years will be found to be throbbing with life, and we have already seen that in them the Negro was doing what he could on his own account to move forward. After the high moral stand of the Revolution, however, the period seems quiescent, and it was indeed a time of definite reaction. This was attributable to three great events: the opening of the Southwest with the consequent demand for slaves, the Haytian revolution beginning in 1791, and Gabriel's insurrection in 1800.
In no way was the reaction to be seen more clearly than in the decline of the work of the American Convention of Delegates from the Abolition Societies. After 1798 neither Connecticut nor Rhode Island sent delegates; the Southern states all fell away by 1803; and while from New England came the excuse that local conditions hardly made aggressive effort any longer necessary, the lack of zeal in this section was also due to some extent to a growing question as to the wisdom of interfering with slavery in the South. In Virginia, that just a few years before had been so active, a statute was now passed imposing a penalty of one hundred dollars on any person who assisted a slave in asserting his freedom, provided he failed to establish the claim; and another provision enjoined that no member of an abolition society should serve as a juror in a freedom suit. Even the Pennsylvania society showed signs of faintheartedness, and in 1806 the Convention decided upon triennial rather than annual meetings. It did not again become really vigorous until after the War of 1812.
1. [The Cotton-Gin, the New Southwest, and the First Fugitive Slave Law]
Of incalculable significance in the history of the Negro in America was the series of inventions in England by Arkwright, Hargreaves, and Crompton in the years 1768-79. In the same period came the discovery of the power of steam by James Watt of Glasgow and its application to cotton manufacture, and improvements followed quickly in printing and bleaching. There yet remained one final invention of importance for the cultivation of cotton on a large scale. Eli Whitney, a graduate of Yale, went to Georgia and was employed as a teacher by the widow of General Greene on her plantation. Seeing the need of some machine for the more rapid separating of cotton-seed from the fiber, he labored until in 1793 he succeeded in making his cotton-gin of practical value. The tradition is persistent, however, that the real credit of the invention belongs to a Negro on the plantation. The cotton-gin created great excitement throughout the South and began to be utilized everywhere. The cultivation and exporting of the staple grew by leaps and bounds. In 1791 only thirty-eight bales of standard size were exported from the United States; in 1816, however, the cotton sent out of the country was worth $24,106,000 and was by far the most valuable article of export. The current price was 28 cents a pound. Thus at the very time that the Northern states were abolishing slavery, an industry that had slumbered became supreme, and the fate of hundreds of thousands of Negroes was sealed.
Meanwhile the opening of the West went forward, and from Maine and Massachusetts, Carolina and Georgia journeyed the pioneers to lay the foundations of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and Alabama and Mississippi. It was an eager, restless caravan that moved, and sometimes more than a hundred persons in a score of wagons were to be seen going from a single town in the East—"Baptists and Methodists and Democrats." The careers of Boone and Sevier and those who went with them, and the story of their fights with the Indians, are now a part of the romance of American history. In 1790 a cluster of log huts on the Ohio River was named in honor of the Society of the Cincinnati. In 1792 Kentucky was admitted to the Union, the article on slavery in her constitution encouraging the system and discouraging emancipation, and Tennessee also entered as a slave state in 1796.
Of tremendous import to the Negro were the questions relating to the Mississippi Territory. After the Revolution Georgia laid claim to great tracts of land now comprising the states of Alabama and Mississippi, with the exception of the strip along the coast claimed by Spain in connection with Florida. This territory became a rich field for speculation, and its history in its entirety makes a complicated story. A series of sales to what were known as the Yazoo Companies, especially in that part of the present states whose northern boundary would be a line drawn from the mouth of the Yazoo to the Chattahoochee, resulted in conflicting claims, the last grant sale being made in 1795 by a corrupt legislature at the price of a cent and a half an acre. James Jackson now raised the cry of bribery and corruption, resigned from the United States Senate, secured a seat in the state legislature, and on February 13, 1796, carried through a bill rescinding the action of the previous year,[64] and the legislature burned the documents concerned with the Yazoo sale in token of its complete repudiation of them. The purchasers to whom the companies had sold lands now began to bombard Congress with petitions and President Adams helped to arrive at a settlement by which Georgia transferred the lands in question to the Federal Government, which undertook to form of them the Mississippi Territory and to pay any damages involved. In 1802 Georgia threw the whole burden upon the central government by transferring to it all of her land beyond her present boundaries, though for this she exacted an article favorable to slavery. All was now made into the Mississippi Territory, to which Congress held out the promise that it would be admitted as a state as soon as its population numbered 60,000; but Alabama was separated from Mississippi in 1816. The old matter of claims was not finally disposed of until an act of 1814 appropriated $5,000,000 for the purpose. In the same year Andrew Jackson's decisive victories over the Creeks at Talladega and Horseshoe Bend—of which more must be said—resulted in the cession of a vast tract of the land of that unhappy nation and thus finally opened for settlement three-fourths of the present state of Alabama.
It was in line with the advance that slavery was making in new territory that there was passed the first Fugitive Slave Act (1793). This grew out of the discussion incident to the seizure in 1791 at Washington, Penn., of a Negro named John, who was taken to Virginia, and the correspondence between the Governor of Pennsylvania and the Governor of Virginia with reference to the case. The important third section of the act read as follows:
And be it also enacted, That when a person held to labor in any of the United States, or in either of the territories on the northwest or south of the river Ohio, under the laws thereof, shall escape into any other of the said states or territory, the person to whom such labor or service may be due, his agent or attorney, is hereby empowered to seize or arrest such fugitive from labor, and to take him or her before any judge of the circuit or district courts of the United States, residing or being within the state, or before any magistrate of a county, city or town corporate, wherein such seizure or arrest shall be made, and upon proof to the satisfaction of such judge or magistrate, either by oral testimony or affidavit taken before and certified by a magistrate of any such state or territory, that the person so seized or arrested, doth, under the laws of the state or territory from which he or she fled, owe service or labor to the person claiming him or her, it shall be the duty of such judge or magistrate to give a certificate thereof to such claimant, his agent or attorney, which shall be sufficient warrant for removing the said fugitive from labor, to the state or territory from which he or she fled.
It will be observed that by the terms of this enactment a master had the right to recover a fugitive slave by proving his ownership before a magistrate without a jury or any other of the ordinary forms of law. A human being was thus placed at the disposal of the lowest of courts and subjected to such procedure as was not allowed even in petty property suits. A great field for the bribery of magistrates was opened up, and opportunity was given for committing to slavery Negro men about whose freedom there should have been no question.
By the close of the decade 1790-1800 the fear occasioned by the Haytian revolution had led to a general movement against the importation of Negroes, especially of those from the West Indies. Even Georgia in 1798 prohibited the importation of all slaves, and this provision, although very loosely enforced, was never repealed. In South Carolina, however, to the utter chagrin and dismay of the other states, importation, prohibited in 1787, was again legalized in 1803; and in the four years immediately following 39,075 Negroes were brought to Charleston, most of these going to the territories.[65] When in 1803 Ohio was carved out of the Northwest Territory as a free state, an attempt was made to claim the rest of the territory for slavery, but this failed. In the congressional session of 1804-5 the matter of slavery in the newly acquired territory of Louisiana was brought up, and slaves were allowed to be imported if they had come to the United States before 1798, the purpose of this provision being to guard against the consequences of South Carolina's recent act, although such a clause never received rigid enforcement. The mention of Louisiana, however, brings us concretely to Toussaint L'Ouverture, the greatest Negro in the New World in the period and one of the greatest of all time.
2. [Toussaint L'Ouverture, Louisiana, and the Formal Closing of the Slave-Trade]
When the French Revolution broke out in 1789, it was not long before its general effects were felt in the West Indies. Of special importance was Santo Domingo because of the commercial interests centered there. The eastern end of the island was Spanish, but the western portion was French, and in this latter part was a population of 600,000, of which number 50,000 were French Creoles, 50,000 mulattoes, and 500,000 pure Negroes. All political and social privileges were monopolized by the Creoles, while the Negroes were agricultural laborers and slaves; and between the two groups floated the restless element of the free people of color.
When the General Assembly in France decreed equality of rights to all citizens, the mulattoes of Santo Domingo made a petition for the enjoyment of the same political privileges as the white people—to the unbounded consternation of the latter. They were rewarded with a decree which was so ambiguously worded that it was open to different interpretations and which simply heightened the animosity that for years had been smoldering. A new petition to the Assembly in 1791 primarily for an interpretation brought forth on May 15 the explicit decree that the people of color were to have all the rights and privileges of citizens, provided they had been born of free parents on both sides. The white people were enraged by the decision, turned royalist, and trampled the national cockade underfoot; and throughout the summer armed strife and conflagration were the rule. To add to the confusion the black slaves struck for freedom and on the night of August 23, 1791, drenched the island in blood. In the face of these events the Conventional Assembly rescinded its order, then announced that the original decree must be obeyed, and it sent three commissioners with troops to Santo Domingo, real authority being invested in Santhonax and Polverel.
On June 20, 1793, at Cape François trouble was renewed by a quarrel between a mulatto and a white officer in the marines. The seamen came ashore and loaned their assistance to the white people, and the Negroes now joined forces with the mulattoes. In the battle of two days that followed the arsenal was taken and plundered, thousands were killed in the streets, and more than half of the town was burned. The French commissioners were the unhappy witnesses of the scene, but they were practically helpless, having only about a thousand troops. Santhonax, however, issued a proclamation offering freedom to all slaves who were willing to range themselves under the banner of the Republic. This was the first proclamation for the freeing of slaves in Santo Domingo, and as a result of it many of the Negroes came in and were enfranchised.
Soon after this proclamation Polverel left his colleague at the Cape and went to Port au Prince, the capital of the West. Here things were quiet and the cultivation of the crops was going forward as usual. The slaves were soon unsettled, however, by the news of what was being done elsewhere, and Polverel was convinced that emancipation could not be delayed and that for the safety of the planters themselves it was necessary to extend it to the whole island. In September (1793) he set in circulation from Aux Cayes a proclamation to this effect, and at the same time he exhorted all the planters in the vicinity who concurred in his work to register their names. This almost all of them did, as they were convinced of the need of measures for their personal safety; and on February 4, 1794, the Conventional Assembly in Paris formally approved all that had been done by decreeing the abolition of slavery in all the colonies of France.
All the while the Spanish and the English had been looking on with interest and had even come to the French part of the island as if to aid in the restoration of order. Among the former, at first in charge of a little royalist band, was the Negro, Toussaint, later called L'Ouverture. He was then a man in the prime of life, forty-eight years old, and already his experience had given him the wisdom that was needed to bring peace in Santo Domingo. In April, 1794, impressed by the decree of the Assembly, he returned to the jurisdiction of France and took service under the Republic. In 1796 he became a general of brigade; in 1797 general-in-chief, with the military command of the whole colony.
He at once compelled the surrender of the English who had invaded his country. With the aid of a commercial agreement with the United States, he next starved out the garrison of his rival, the mulatto Rigaud, whom he forced to consent to leave the country. He then imprisoned Roume, the agent of the Directory, and assumed civil as well as military authority. He also seized the Spanish part of the island, which had been ceded to France some years before but had not been actually surrendered. He then, in May, 1801, gave to Santo Domingo a constitution by which he not only assumed power for life but gave to himself the right of naming his successor; and all the while he was awakening the admiration of the world by his bravery, his moderation, and his genuine instinct for government.
Across the ocean, however, a jealous man was watching with interest the career of the "gilded African." None knew better than Napoleon that it was because he did not trust France that Toussaint had sought the friendship of the United States, and none read better than he the logic of events. As Adams says, "Bonaparte's acts as well as his professions showed that he was bent on crushing democratic ideas, and that he regarded St. Domingo as an outpost of American republicanism, although Toussaint had made a rule as arbitrary as that of Bonaparte himself.... By a strange confusion of events, Toussaint L'Ouverture, because he was a Negro, became the champion of republican principles, with which he had nothing but the instinct of personal freedom in common. Toussaint's government was less republican than that of Bonaparte; he was doing by necessity in St. Domingo what Bonaparte was doing by choice in France."[66]
This was the man to whom the United States ultimately owes the purchase of Louisiana. On October 1, 1801, Bonaparte gave orders to General Le Clerc for a great expedition against Santo Domingo. In January, 1802, Le Clerc appeared and war followed. In the course of this, Toussaint—who was ordinarily so wise and who certainly knew that from Napoleon he had most to fear—made the great mistake of his life and permitted himself to be led into a conference on a French vessel. He was betrayed and taken to France, where within the year he died of pneumonia in the dungeon of Joux. Immediately there was a proclamation annulling the decree of 1794 giving freedom to the slaves. Bonaparte, however, had not estimated the force of Toussaint's work, and to assist the Negroes in their struggle now came a stalwart ally, yellow fever. By the end of the summer only one-seventh of Le Clerc's army remained, and he himself died in November. At once Bonaparte planned a new expedition. While he was arranging for the leadership of this, however, the European war broke out again. Meanwhile the treaty for the retrocession of the territory of Louisiana had not yet received the signature of the Spanish king, because Godoy, the Spanish representative, would not permit the signature to be affixed until all the conditions were fulfilled; and toward the end of 1802 the civil officer at New Orleans closed the Mississippi to the United States. Jefferson, at length moved by the plea of the South, sent a special envoy, no less a man than James Monroe, to France to negotiate the purchase; Bonaparte, disgusted by the failure of his Egyptian expedition and his project for reaching India, and especially by his failure in Santo Domingo, in need also of ready money, listened to the offer; and the people of the United States—who within the last few years have witnessed the spoliation of Hayti—have not yet realized how much they owe to the courage of 500,000 Haytian Negroes who refused to be slaves.
The slavery question in the new territory was a critical one. It was on account of it that the Federalists had opposed the acquisition; the American Convention endeavored to secure a provision like that of the Northwest Ordinance; and the Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends in Philadelphia in 1805 prayed "that effectual measures may be adopted by Congress to prevent the introduction of slavery into any of the territories of the United States." Nevertheless the whole territory without regard to latitude was thrown open to the system March 2, 1805.
In spite of this victory for slavery, however, the general force of the events in Hayti was such as to make more certain the formal closing of the slave-trade at the end of the twenty-year period for which the Constitution had permitted it to run. The conscience of the North had been profoundly stirred, and in the far South was the ever-present fear of a reproduction of the events in Hayti. The agitation in England moreover was at last about to bear fruit in the act of 1807 forbidding the slave-trade. In America it seems from the first to have been an understood thing, especially by the Southern representatives, that even if such an act passed it would be only irregularly enforced, and the debates were concerned rather with the disposal of illegally imported Africans and with the punishment of those concerned in the importation than with the proper limitation of the traffic by water.[67] On March 2, 1807, the act was passed forbidding the slave-trade after the close of the year. In course of time it came very near to being a dead letter, as may be seen from presidential messages, reports of cabinet officers, letters of collectors of revenue, letters of district attorneys, reports of committees of Congress, reports of naval commanders, statements on the floor of Congress, the testimony of eye-witnesses, and the complaints of home and foreign anti-slavery societies. Fernandina and Galveston were only two of the most notorious ports for smuggling. A regular chain of posts was established from the head of St. Mary's River to the upper country, and through the Indian nation, by means of which the Negroes were transferred to every part of the country.[68] If dealers wished to form a caravan they would give an Indian alarm, so that the woods might be less frequented, and if pursued in Georgia they would escape into Florida. One small schooner contained one hundred and thirty souls. "They were almost packed into a small space, between a floor laid over the water-casks and the deck—not near three feet—insufficient for them to sit upright—and so close that chafing against each other their bones pierced the skin and became galled and ulcerated by the motion of the vessel." Many American vessels were engaged in the trade under Spanish colors, and the traffic to Africa was pursued with uncommon vigor at Havana, the crews of vessels being made up of men of all nations, who were tempted by the high wages to be earned. Evidently officials were negligent in the discharge of their duty, but even if offenders were apprehended it did not necessarily follow that they would receive effective punishment. President Madison in his message of December 5, 1810, said, "It appears that American citizens are instrumental in carrying on a traffic in enslaved Africans, equally in violation of the laws of humanity, and in defiance of those of their own country"; and on January 7, 1819, the Register of the Treasury made to the House the amazing report that "it doth not appear, from an examination of the records of this office, and particularly of the accounts (to the date of their last settlement) of the collectors of the customs, and of the several marshals of the United States, that any forfeitures had been incurred under the said act." A supplementary and compromising and ineffective act of 1818 sought to concentrate efforts against smuggling by encouraging informers; and one of the following year that authorized the President to "make such regulations and arrangements as he may deem expedient for the safe keeping, support, and removal beyond the limits of the United States" of recaptured Africans, and that bore somewhat more fruit, was in large measure due to the colonization movement and of importance in connection with the founding of Liberia.
Thus, while the formal closing of the slave-trade might seem to be a great step forward, the laxness with which the decree was enforced places it definitely in the period of reaction.
3. [Gabriel's Insurrection and the Rise of the Negro Problem]
Gabriel's insurrection of 1800 was by no means the most formidable revolt that the Southern states witnessed. In design it certainly did not surpass the scope of the plot of Denmark Vesey twenty-two years later, and in actual achievement it was insignificant when compared not only with Nat Turner's insurrection but even with the uprisings sixty years before. At the last moment in fact a great storm that came up made the attempt to execute the plan a miserable failure. Nevertheless coming as it did so soon after the revolution in Hayti, and giving evidence of young and unselfish leadership, the plot was regarded as of extraordinary significance.
Gabriel himself[69] was an intelligent slave only twenty-four years old, and his chief assistant was Jack Bowler, aged twenty-eight. Throughout the summer of 1800 he matured his plan, holding meetings at which a brother named Martin interpreted various texts from Scripture as bearing on the situation of the Negroes. His insurrection was finally set for the first day of September. It was well planned. The rendezvous was to be a brook six miles from Richmond. Under cover of night the force of 1,100 was to march in three columns on the city, then a town of 8,000 inhabitants, the right wing to seize the penitentiary building which had just been converted into an arsenal, while the left took possession of the powder-house. These two columns were to be armed with clubs, and while they were doing their work the central force, armed with muskets, knives, and pikes, was to begin the carnage, none being spared except the French, whom it is significant that the Negroes favored. In Richmond at the time there were not more than four or five hundred men with about thirty muskets; but in the arsenal were several thousand guns, and the powder-house was well stocked. Seizure of the mills was to guarantee the insurrectionists a food supply; and meanwhile in the country districts were the new harvests of corn, and flocks and herds were fat in the fields.
On the day appointed for the uprising Virginia witnessed such a storm as she had not seen in years. Bridges were carried away, and roads and plantations completely submerged. Brook Swamp, the strategic point for the Negroes, was inundated; and the country Negroes could not get into the city, nor could those in the city get out to the place of rendezvous. The force of more than a thousand dwindled to three hundred, and these, almost paralyzed by fear and superstition, were dismissed. Meanwhile a slave who did not wish to see his master killed divulged the plot, and all Richmond was soon in arms.
A troop of United States cavalry was ordered to the city and arrests followed quickly. Three hundred dollars was offered by Governor Monroe for the arrest of Gabriel, and as much more for Jack Bowler. Bowler surrendered, but it took weeks to find Gabriel. Six men were convicted and condemned to be executed on September 12, and five more on September 18. Gabriel was finally captured on September 24 at Norfolk on a vessel that had come from Richmond; he was convicted on October 3 and executed on October 7. He showed no disposition to dissemble as to his own plan; at the same time he said not one word that incriminated anybody else. After him twenty-four more men were executed; then it began to appear that some "mistakes" had been made and the killing ceased. About the time of this uprising some Negroes were also assembled for an outbreak in Suffolk County; there were alarms in Petersburg and in the country near Edenton, N.C.; and as far away as Charleston the excitement was intense.
There were at least three other Negro insurrections of importance in the period 1790-1820. When news came of the uprising of the slaves in Santo Domingo in 1791, the Negroes in Louisiana planned a similar effort.[70] They might have succeeded better if they had not disagreed as to the hour of the outbreak, when one of them informed the commandant. As a punishment twenty-three of the slaves were hanged along the banks of the river and their corpses left dangling for days; but three white men who assisted them and who were really the most guilty of all, were simply sent out of the colony. In Camden, S. C, on July 4, 1816, some other Negroes risked all for independence.[71] On various pretexts men from the country districts were invited to the town on the appointed night, and different commands were assigned, all except that of commander-in-chief, which position was to be given to him who first forced the gates of the arsenal. Again the plot was divulged by "a favorite and confidential slave," of whom we are told that the state legislature purchased the freedom, settling upon him a pension for life. About six of the leaders were executed. On or about May 1, 1819, there was a plot to destroy the city of Augusta, Ga.[72] The insurrectionists were to assemble at Beach Island, proceed to Augusta, set fire to the place, and then destroy the inhabitants. Guards were posted, and a white man who did not answer when hailed was shot and fatally wounded. A Negro named Coot was tried as being at the head of the conspiracy and sentenced to be executed a few days later. Other trials followed his. Not a muscle moved when the verdict was pronounced upon him.
The deeper meaning of such events as these could not escape the discerning. More than one patriot had to wonder just whither the country was drifting. Already it was evident that the ultimate problem transcended the mere question of slavery, and many knew that human beings could not always be confined to an artificial status. Throughout the period the slave-trade seemed to flourish without any real check, and it was even accentuated by the return to power of the old royalist houses of Europe after the fall of Napoleon. Meanwhile it was observed that slave labor was driving out of the South the white man of small means, and antagonism between the men of the "up-country" and the seaboard capitalists was brewing. The ordinary social life of the Negro in the South left much to be desired, and conditions were not improved by the rapid increase. As for slavery itself, no one could tell when or where or how the system would end; all only knew that it was developing apace: and meanwhile there was the sinister possibility of the alliance of the Negro and the Indian. Sincere plans of gradual abolition were advanced in the South as well as the North, but in the lower section they seldom got more than a respectful hearing. In his "Dissertation on Slavery, with a Proposal for the Gradual Abolition of it in the State of Virginia," St. George Tucker, a professor of law in the University of William and Mary, and one of the judges of the General Court of Virginia, in 1796 advanced a plan by which he figured that after sixty years there would be only one-third as many slaves as at first. At this distance his proposal seems extremely conservative; at the time, however, it was laid on the table by the Virginia House of Delegates, and from the Senate the author received merely "a civil acknowledgment."
Two men of the period—widely different in temper and tone, but both earnest seekers after truth—looked forward to the future with foreboding, one with the eye of the scientist, the other with the vision of the seer. Hezekiah Niles had full sympathy with the groping and striving of the South; but he insisted that slavery must ultimately be abolished throughout the country, that the minds of the slaves should be exalted, and that reasonable encouragement should be given free Negroes.[73] Said he: "We are ashamed of the thing we practice;... there is no attribute of heaven that takes part with us, and we know it. And in the contest that must come and will come, there will be a heap of sorrows such as the world has rarely seen."[74]
On the other hand rose Lorenzo Dow, the foremost itinerant preacher of the time, the first Protestant who expounded the gospel in Alabama and Mississippi, and a reformer who at the very moment that cotton was beginning to be supreme, presumed to tell the South that slavery was wrong.[75] Everywhere he arrested attention—with his long hair, his harsh voice, and his wild gesticulation startling all conservative hearers. But he was made in the mold of heroes. In his lifetime he traveled not less than two hundred thousand miles, preaching to more people than any other man of his time. Several times he went to Canada, once to the West Indies, and three times to England, everywhere drawing great crowds about him. In A Cry from the Wilderness he more than once clothed his thought in enigmatic garb, but the meaning was always ultimately clear. At this distance, when slavery and the Civil War are alike viewed in the perspective, the words of the oracle are almost uncanny: "In the rest of the Southern states the influence of these Foreigners will be known and felt in its time, and the seeds from the HORY ALLIANCE and the DECAPIGANDI, who have a hand in those grades of Generals, from the Inquisitor to the Vicar General and down...!!! The STRUGGLE will be DREADFUL! the CUP will be BITTER! and when the agony is over, those who survive may see better days! FAREWELL!"
Footnote 64: [(return)]
Phillips in The South in the Building of the Nation, II, 154.
Footnote 65: [(return)]
DuBois: Suppression of the Slave-Trade, 90.
Footnote 66: [(return)]
History of the United States, I, 391-392.
Footnote 67: [(return)]
See DuBois, 95, ff.
Footnote 68: [(return)]
Niles's Register, XIV, 176 (May 2, 1818).
Footnote 69: [(return)]
His full name was Gabriel Prosser.
Footnote 70: [(return)]
Gayarré: History of Louisiana, III, 355.
Footnote 71: [(return)]
Holland: Refutation of Calumnies.
Footnote 72: [(return)]
Niles's Register, XVI, 213 (May 22, 1819).
Footnote 73: [(return)]
Register, XVI, 177 (May 8, 1819).
Footnote 74: [(return)]
Ibid., XVI, 213 (May 22, 1819).
Footnote 75: [(return)]
For full study see article "Lorenzo Dow," in Methodist Review and Journal of Negro History, July, 1916, the same being included in Africa and the War, New York, 1918.
CHAPTER V
INDIAN AND NEGRO
It is not the purpose of the present chapter to give a history of the Seminole Wars, or even to trace fully the connection of the Negro with these contests. We do hope to show at least, however, that the Negro was more important than anything else as an immediate cause of controversy, though the general pressure of the white man upon the Indian would in time of course have made trouble in any case. Strange parallels constantly present themselves, and incidentally it may be seen that the policy of the Government in force in other and even later years with reference to the Negro was at this time also very largely applied in the case of the Indian.
1. [Creek, Seminole, and Negro to 1817: The War of 1812]
On August 7, 1786, the Continental Congress by a definite and far-reaching ordinance sought to regulate for the future the whole conduct of Indian affairs. Two great districts were formed, one including the territory north of the Ohio and west of the Hudson, and the other including that south of the Ohio and east of the Mississippi; and for anything pertaining to the Indian in each of these two great tracts a superintendent was appointed. As affecting the Negro the southern district was naturally of vastly more importance than the northern. In the eastern portion of this, mainly in what are now Georgia, eastern Tennessee, and eastern Alabama, were the Cherokees and the great confederacy of the Creeks, while toward the west, in the present Mississippi and western Alabama, were the Chickasaws and the Choctaws. Of Muskhogean stock, and originally a part of the Creeks, were the Seminoles ("runaways"), who about 1750, under the leadership of a great chieftain, Secoffee, separated from the main confederacy, which had its center in southwest Georgia just a little south of Columbus, and overran the peninsula of Florida. In 1808 came another band under Micco Hadjo to the present site of Tallahassee. The Mickasukie tribe was already on the ground in the vicinity of this town, and at first its members objected to the newcomers, who threatened to take their lands from them; but at length all abode peaceably together under the general name of Seminoles. About 1810 these people had twenty towns, the chief ones being Mikasuki and Tallahassee. From the very first they had received occasional additions from the Yemassee, who had been driven out of South Carolina, and of fugitive Negroes.
By the close of the eighteenth century all along the frontier the Indian had begun to feel keenly the pressure of the white man, and in his struggle with the invader he recognized in the oppressed Negro a natural ally. Those Negroes who by any chance became free were welcomed by the Indians, fugitives from bondage found refuge with them, and while Indian chiefs commonly owned slaves, the variety of servitude was very different from that under the white man. The Negroes were comparatively free, and intermarriage was frequent; thus a mulatto woman who fled from bondage married a chief and became the mother of a daughter who in course of time became the wife of the famous Osceola. This very close connection of the Negro with the family life of the Indian was the determining factor in the resistance of the Seminoles to the demands of the agents of the United States, and a reason, stronger even than his love for his old hunting-ground, for his objection to removal to new lands beyond the Mississippi. Very frequently the Indian could not give up his Negroes without seeing his own wife and children led away into bondage; and thus to native courage and pride was added the instinct of a father for the preservation of his own.
In the two wars between the Americans and the English it was but natural that the Indian should side with the English, and it was in some measure but a part of the game that he should receive little consideration at the hands of the victor. In the politics played by the English and the French, the English and the Spaniards, and finally between the Americans and all Europeans, the Indian was ever the loser. In the very early years of the Carolina colonies, some effort was made to enslave the Indians; but such servants soon made their way to the Indian country, and it was not long before they taught the Negroes to do likewise. This constant escape of slaves, with its attendant difficulties, largely accounted for the establishing of the free colony of Georgia between South Carolina and the Spanish possession, Florida. It was soon evident, however, that the problem had been aggravated rather than settled. When Congress met in 1776 it received from Georgia a communication setting forth the need of "preventing slaves from deserting their masters"; and as soon as the Federal Government was organized in 1789 it received also from Georgia an urgent request for protection from the Creeks, who were charged with various ravages, and among other documents presented was a list of one hundred and ten Negroes who were said to have left their masters during the Revolution and to have found refuge among the Creeks. Meanwhile by various treaties, written and unwritten, the Creeks were being forced toward the western line of the state, and in any agreement the outstanding stipulation was always for the return of fugitive slaves. For a number of years the Creeks retreated without definitely organized resistance. In the course of the War of 1812, however, moved by the English and by a visit from Tecumseh, they suddenly rose, and on August 30, 1813, under the leadership of Weathersford, they attacked Fort Mims, a stockade thirty-five miles north of Mobile. The five hundred and fifty-three men, women, and children in this place were almost completely massacred. Only fifteen white persons escaped by hiding in the woods, a number of Negroes being taken prisoner. This occurrence spurred the whole Southwest to action. Volunteers were called for, and the Tennessee legislature resolved to exterminate the whole tribe. Andrew Jackson with Colonel Coffee administered decisive defeats at Talladega and Tohopeka or Horseshoe Bend on the Tallapoosa River, and the Creeks were forced to sue for peace. By the treaty of Fort Jackson (August 9, 1814) the future president, now a major general in the regular army and in command at Mobile, demanded that the unhappy nation give up more than half of its land as indemnity for the cost of the war, that it hold no communication with a Spanish garrison or town, that it permit the necessary roads to be made or forts to be built in any part of the territory, and that it surrender the prophets who had instigated the war. This last demand was ridiculous, or only for moral effect, for the so-called prophets had already been left dead on the field of battle. The Creeks were quite broken, however, and Jackson passed on to fame and destiny at the Battle of New Orleans, January 8, 1815. In April of this year he was made commander-in-chief of the Southern Division.[76] It soon developed that his chief task in this capacity was to reckon with the Seminoles.
On the Appalachicola River the British had rebuilt an old fort, calling it the British Post on the Appalachicola. Early in the summer of 1815 the commander, Nicholls, had occasion to go to London, and he took with him his troops, the chief Francis, and several Creeks, leaving in the fort seven hundred and sixty-three barrels of cannon powder, twenty-five hundred muskets, and numerous pistols and other weapons of war. The Negroes from Georgia who had come to the vicinity, who numbered not less than a thousand, and who had some well kept farms up and down the banks of the river, now took charge of the fort and made it their headquarters. They were joined by some Creeks, and the so-called Negro Fort soon caused itself to be greatly feared by any white people who happened to live near. Demands on the Spanish governor for its suppression were followed by threats of the use of the soldiery of the United States; and General Gaines, under orders in the section, wrote to Jackson asking authority to build near the boundary another post that might be used as the base for any movement that had as its aim to overawe the Negroes. Jackson readily complied with the request, saying, "I have no doubt that this fort has been established by some villains for the purpose of murder, rapine, and plunder, and that it ought to be blown up regardless of the ground it stands on. If you have come to the same conclusion, destroy it, and restore the stolen Negroes and property to their rightful owners." Gaines accordingly built Fort Scott not far from where the Flint and the Chattahoochee join to form the Appalachicola. It was necessary for Gaines to pass the Negro Fort in bringing supplies to his own men; and on July 17, 1816, the boats of the Americans were within range of the fort and opened fire. There was some preliminary shooting, and then, since the walls were too stubborn to be battered down by a light fire, "a ball made red-hot in the cook's galley was put in the gun and sent screaming over the wall and into the magazine. The roar, the shock, the scene that followed, may be imagined, but not described. Seven hundred barrels of gunpowder tore the earth, the fort, and all the wretched creatures in it to fragments. Two hundred and seventy men, women, and children died on the spot. Of sixty-four taken out alive, the greater number died soon after."[77]
The Seminoles—in the West more and more identified with the Creeks—were angered by their failure to recover the lands lost by the treaty of Fort Jackson and also by the building of Fort Scott. One settlement, Fowltown, fifteen miles east of Fort Scott, was especially excited and in the fall of 1817 sent a warning to the Americans "not to cross or cut a stick of timber on the east side of the Flint." The warning was regarded as a challenge; Fowltown was taken on a morning in November, and the Seminole Wars had begun.
2. [First Seminole War and the Treaties of Indian Spring and Fort Moultrie]
In the course of the First Seminole War (1817-18) Jackson ruthlessly laid waste the towns of the Indians; he also took Pensacola, and he awakened international difficulties by his rather summary execution of two British subjects, Arbuthnot and Ambrister, who were traders to the Indians and sustained generally pleasant relations with them. For his conduct, especially in this last instance, he was severely criticized in Congress, but it is significant of his rising popularity that no formal vote of censure could pass against him. On the cession of Florida to the United States he was appointed territorial governor; but he served for a brief term only. As early as 1822 he was nominated for the presidency by the legislature of Tennessee, and in 1823 he was sent to the United States Senate.
Of special importance in the history of the Creeks about this time was the treaty of Indian Spring, of January 8, 1821, an iniquitous agreement in the signing of which bribery and firewater were more than usually present. By this the Creeks ceded to the United States, for the benefit of Georgia, five million acres of their most valuable land. In cash they were to receive $200,000, in payments extending over fourteen years. The United States Government moreover was to hold $250,000 as a fund from which the citizens of Georgia were to be reimbursed for any "claims" (for runaway slaves of course) that the citizens of the state had against the Creeks prior to the year 1802.[78] In the actual execution of this agreement a slave was frequently estimated at two or three times his real value, and the Creeks were expected to pay whether the fugitive was with them or not. All possible claims, however, amounted to $101,000. This left $149,000 of the money in the hands of the Government. This sum was not turned over to the Indians, as one might have expected, but retained until 1834, when the Georgia citizens interested petitioned for a division. The request was referred to the Commission on Indian Affairs, and the chairman, Gilmer of Georgia, was in favor of dividing the money among the petitioners as compensation for "the offspring which the slaves would have borne had they remained in bondage." This suggestion was rejected at the time, but afterwards the division was made nevertheless; and history records few more flagrant violations of all principles of honor and justice.
The First Seminole War, while in some ways disastrous to the Indians, was in fact not much more than the preliminary skirmish of a conflict that was not to cease until 1842. In general the Indians, mindful of the ravages of the War of 1812, did not fully commit themselves and bided their time. They were in fact so much under cover that they led the Americans to underestimate their real numbers. When the cession of Florida was formally completed, however (July 17, 1821), they were found to be on the very best spots of land in the territory. On May 20, 1822, Colonel Gad Humphreys was appointed agent to them, William P. Duval as governor of the territory being ex-officio superintendent of Indian affairs. Altogether the Indians at this time, according to the official count, numbered 1,594 men, 1,357 women, and 993 children, a total of 3,944, with 150 Negro men and 650 Negro women and children.[79] In the interest of these people Humphreys labored faithfully for eight years, and not a little of the comparative quiet in his period of service is to be credited to his own sympathy, good sense, and patience.
In the spring of 1823 the Indians were surprised by the suggestion of a treaty that would definitely limit their boundaries and outline their future relations with the white man. The representative chiefs had no desire for a conference, were exceedingly reluctant to meet the commissioners, and finally came to the meeting prompted only by the hope that such terms might be arrived at as would permanently guarantee them in the peaceable possession of their homes. Over the very strong protest of some of them a treaty was signed at Fort Moultrie, on the coast five miles below St. Augustine, September 18, 1823, William P. Duval, James Gadsden, and Bernard Segui being the representatives of the United States. By this treaty we learn that the Indians, in view of the fact that they have "thrown themselves on, and have promised to continue under, the protection of the United States, and of no other nation, power, or sovereignty; and in consideration of the promises and stipulations hereinafter made, do cede and relinquish all claim or title which they have to the whole territory of Florida, with the exception of such district of country as shall herein be allotted to them." They are to have restricted boundaries, the extreme point of which is nowhere to be nearer than fifteen miles to the Gulf of Mexico. The United States promises to distribute, as soon as the Indians are settled on their new land, under the direction of their agent, "implements of husbandry, and stock of cattle and hogs to the amount of six thousand dollars, and an annual sum of five thousand dollars a year for twenty successive years"; and "to restrain and prevent all white persons from hunting, settling, or otherwise intruding" upon the land set apart for the Indians, though any American citizen, lawfully authorized, is to pass and repass within the said district and navigate the waters thereof "without any hindrance, toll or exactions from said tribes." For facilitating removal and as compensation for any losses or inconvenience sustained, the United States is to furnish rations of corn, meat, and salt for twelve months, with a special appropriation of $4,500 for those who have made improvements, and $2,000 more for the facilitating of transportation. The agent, sub-agent, and interpreter are to reside within the Indian boundary "to watch over the interests of said tribes"; and the United States further undertake "as an evidence of their humane policy towards said tribes" to allow $1,000 a year for twenty years for the establishment of a school and $1,000 a year for the same period for the support of a gun- and blacksmith. Of supreme importance is Article 7: "The chiefs and warriors aforesaid, for themselves and tribes, stipulate to be active and vigilant in the preventing the retreating to, or passing through, the district of country assigned them, of any absconding slaves, or fugitives from justice; and further agree to use all necessary exertions to apprehend and deliver the same to the agent, who shall receive orders to compensate them agreeably to the trouble and expense incurred." We have dwelt at length upon the provisions of this treaty because it contained all the seeds of future trouble between the white man and the Indian. Six prominent chiefs—Nea Mathla, John Blunt, Tuski Hajo, Mulatto King, Emathlochee, and Econchattimico—refused absolutely to sign, and their marks were not won until each was given a special reservation of from two to four square miles outside the Seminole boundaries. Old Nea Mathla in fact never did accept the treaty in good faith, and when the time came for the execution of the agreement he summoned his warriors to resistance. Governor Duval broke in upon his war council, deposed the war leaders, and elevated those who favored peaceful removal. The Seminoles now retired to their new lands, but Nea Mathla was driven into practical exile. He retired to the Creeks, by whom he was raised to the dignity of a chief. It was soon realized by the Seminoles that they had been restricted to some pine woods by no means as fertile as their old lands, nor were matters made better by one or two seasons of drought. To allay their discontent twenty square miles more, to the north, was given them, but to offset this new cession their rations were immediately reduced.
3. [From the Treaty of Fort Moultrie to the Treaty of Payne's Landing]
Now succeeded ten years of trespassing, of insult, and of increasing enmity. Kidnapers constantly lurked near the Indian possessions, and instances of injury unredressed increased the bitterness and rancor. Under date May 20, 1825, Humphreys[80] wrote to the Indian Bureau that the white settlers were already thronging to the vicinity of the Indian reservation and were likely to become troublesome. As to some recent disturbances, writing from St. Augustine February 9, 1825, he said: "From all I can learn here there is little doubt that the disturbances near Tallahassee, which have of late occasioned so much clamor, were brought about by a course of unjustifiable conduct on the part of the whites, similar to that which it appears to be the object of the territorial legislature to legalize. In fact, it is stated that one Indian had been so severely whipped by the head of the family which was destroyed in these disturbances, as to cause his death; if such be the fact, the subsequent act of the Indians, however lamentable, must be considered as one of retaliation, and I can not but think it is to be deplored that they were afterwards 'hunted' with so unrelenting a revenge." The word hunted was used advisedly by Humphreys, for, as we shall see later, when war was renewed one of the common means of fighting employed by the American officers was the use of bloodhounds. Sometimes guns were taken from the Indians so that they had nothing with which to pursue the chase. On one occasion, when some Indians were being marched to headquarters, a woman far advanced in pregnancy was forced onward with such precipitancy as to produce a premature delivery, which almost terminated her life. More far-reaching than anything else, however, was the constant denial of the rights of the Indian in court in cases involving white men. As Humphreys said, the great disadvantage under which the Seminoles labored as witnesses "destroyed everything like equality of rights." Some of the Negroes that they had, had been born among them, and some others had been purchased from white men and duly paid for. No receipts were given, however, and efforts were frequently made to recapture the Negroes by force. The Indian, conscious of his rights, protested earnestly against such attempts and naturally determined to resist all efforts to wrest from him his rightfully acquired property.