Dispassionate Outline of the Principal Injustices of Antebellum Slavery – Sewing Machines Los Angeles

Those who experienced the worst of slavery were destined to be the most eloquent and highly publicized voices. Frederick Douglass, the great African-American abolitionist, was separated from his mother, transferred to several different masters and endured severe whippings by a man with a reputation for breaking slaves. William Wells Brown experienced the same things as Frederick Douglass. An irate overseer permanently injured Harriet Tubman. The slaves who were treated the worst made the greatest efforts to escape, and those who succeeded then related their own horror stories, to the exclusion of slaves who lived happily and silently on their Southern plantations. Injustice in its many forms impacted every slave, whether they felt its sting or lived their life in spite of it.

I. Intrinsic Injustice

The prime injustice of antebellum slavery was the bondage itself, the intrinsic injustice, not necessarily how the master imposed on the slave insofar as food, clothing, shelter, family, religion, discipline and life were concerned. The entire system was unjust because the slaves had not done anything to deserve their enslavement. An accident of birth determined the antebellum slaves’ lower status. Given human nature and the inequality of power, evil treatment of slaves was inevitable. Frances Anne “Fanny” Kemble wrote an eloquent indictment of slavery in her Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation (1838-1839). An erudite English actress, she married wealthy South Carolina slaveholder Pierce Butler and lived on Butler’s and St. Simon’s Islands for four months one winter. Kemble was appalled at the filth, flogging, unhealthy conditions and abusive rule by overseers. The owner of those island plantations did not stay there during the unhealthy seasons, and even the white overseers left the island for some months due to the diseases prevalent in that swampy area. Unhealthy low country regions caused many slave deaths, and because profits were extraordinarily high there, the slaveholders had less incentive to spare the lives of their slaves.

The low opinion of slave traders found in the Bible, in abolitionist literature and among respectable Southerners personifies the ultimate injustice of slavery. Slave traders transacted the market sales necessary to the running of the institution. Their universal unpopularity underscores the contradiction between treating slaves well and the intrinsic injustice of slavery. Slave traders did the dirty work. With every sale, they replicated the original unjust enslavement of Africans. Slave traders made good money serving as scapegoats for an unjust labor system, because when not being sold, slaves more easily enjoyed life and let their masters think better thoughts about the institution of slavery.

II. The Middle Passage

The Middle Passage was the brutal second leg of a slave ship’s three-leg journey and took slaves from Africa to the New World. If they were lucky, the ships sailed briskly and made the trip in a few weeks, but longer journeys were more common. Slaves experienced unspeakable agonies. By 1860, virtually all slaves in the United States were native-born and had never experienced the horrendous cruelties of that journey. Only the first generation took the Middle Passage. Neo-abolitionists invariably paint all of antebellum slavery with the Middle Passage. The Middle Passage did not take place on American soil, nor was it usually on American ships. According to Dr. Hugh Thomas in The Slave Trade, the Portuguese/Brazilians, English, French, Spaniards, and Dutch each carried more slaves across the Atlantic Ocean than did U.S. ships.

III. Lack of Opportunity & Education

Slaves could not advance in the world beyond the limits set by their owners. Those limits adversely affected the most talented servants more than the less capable. Less able slaves lived near the level they would have obtained if they had been free, and many lived above the level their own efforts would have taken them as free people. Alfred, President Andrew Jackson’s manager at the Hermitage, condensed the anguish of slaves. Alfred asked the unanswerable question: “How would you like to be a slave?” Depriving antebellum slaves of education kept them subservient to their owners and greatly handicapped their progress after Emancipation. Illiteracy resulted from the inherent inequality of involuntary servitude. Lack of education closed doors to professions and trades, limited business opportunities and retarded the economic progress of African-Americans. Freed slaves may have had knowledge of a valuable trade, such as blacksmithing, carpentry, tanning, shoemaking, sewing, construction, milling, cooking or manufacturing. For most, agricultural work was their only useful skill. The children of an illiterate person are often impaired; the problem had a multi-generational effect. Lack of education and opportunity – not the whip, food, clothing, shelter or hard work – were the chief oppressors of antebellum slaves. Emancipation freed blacks from the arbitrary abuse of their masters, but immediately did little to bring the slaves up from slavery to the standards of advanced Western learning. While they already had absorbed Christianity, language and Western values, slaves were intentionally kept ignorant during slavery and had many things to learn. The original disparity between African and Western culture still existed, even though the purely African aspects had been forgotten.

IV. Assault on Family Life

A major sin of slavery was its assault on family life. The sale of family members broke up many slave families. Sexual exploitation of female slaves was continuous throughout antebellum slavery. Parents could not protect their children and spouses. Slaves were not often legally married, and never to white people. Thus, sexual relations between whites and slaves were necessarily anti-marriage. People deprived of a healthy family life suffer in diverse ways. The ideal situation was to keep families together, and on most plantations, slaves worked with their relatives. Better slaveholders consciously kept their people together, for their own benefit as well as for their servants. The ideal situation broke down regularly during estate sales, financial problems, deaths, changes within the white family and sale for disciplinary reasons. The saddest parts of the Federal Writers’ Project Slave Narratives tell of parents, children and spouses sold away, never to see each other again. The cruelest owners sold their own children on the open market.

Sex between white men and black slave women is one of the most riveting aspects of slave history in America. It happened famously in Thomas Jefferson’s family, but this most commonly cited historical instance is a bad example of sexual exploitation. Sally Hemmings continued to be Jefferson’s concubine, or the equivalent of a wife, for 38 years: not the statutory rape used as an analogy, and a durable relationship that far exceeded the modern average for marriages. There was plenty of lesser known sexual exploitation.

Inter-racial sex is without doubt the most inflammatory one in discussions of slavery and race. Sex between black men and white women, or simply the suggestion of it, resulted in lynchings. Sex between white men and black slave women is the most anger-provoking grievance remembered today about antebellum slavery. Because this topic has such power, some defusing of the hottest anger is needed. Some white masters took sexual advantage of their slave ownership, but rape was not usually necessary. As far back as the Roman Empire, it was observed that female slaves frequently fell in love with their masters. Power, especially absolute power, is an aphrodisiac; some say the most powerful one. Some slavery scholars allow no possibility that black female slaves might fall in love with their all-powerful white masters, or even be attracted to them, allowing only the possibilities of forced sex, futility, financial gain or prestige. Those with the facts knew differently. Robert Smalls, who earned a place in history by steering the Confederate steamer Planter out of Charleston Harbor and delivering it to the U.S. Navy, was asked about the premarital sex of female slaves and recalled, “This intercourse is principally with white men with whom they would rather have intercourse than with their own color.” The voluntary nature of sexual relations does not remove the unjust inequality giving rise to them. Antebellum master-servant sexual relations resemble modern-day quid pro quo sexual harassment in the workplace, although the power inequality was exponentially greater before Emancipation. Male slaves often saw the best-looking young slave women attract the attention of white men, a very oppressive fact. Some white men who owned beautiful concubines sold them when their beauty faded. Just as sexual conduct in the modern workforce harms productivity, it adversely affected profits on the slave plantation. Sound management practices kept sexual exploitation down. Southern Cultivator’s 1840 Rules of the Plantation governed sexual harassment under Rule 22nd: [The overseer] will also be immediately discharged, if it is ascertained he is too intimate with any of the negro women.” Slave drivers also took advantage of female workers. The fate of slave mothers giving birth to the children of whites was bound to disappoint them, because they could never achieve the status of their white paramour. White owners typically treated the children they fathered by their servants well, but those children were nevertheless born into a racist society.

Mulattos were more common among free blacks than among slaves and more frequently worked in skilled or privileged positions. Often manumitted, mulatto children were sometimes educated, given property or preferential positions on the plantation, regarded themselves as superior to blacks, sold into lenient conditions and some masters took their offspring to the North, Canada or another free environment. The majority of Wilberforce University’s students before 1861 were mulatto children of Southern planters. Moving North did not escape racism. Some white fathers ignored, denied, sold or mistreated their mulatto children. As in most aspects of slave treatment, much depended upon the character of the slaveholder. The intrinsic injustice asserted itself most strongly in the arbitrary and cruel treatment by less honorable slaveholders. There was plenty of sexual exploitation, no matter how often it occurred or under what circumstances. The very idea of sexual exploitation continues to gall modern people. The rape of slave women is now trumpeted by victimologists out of all proportion to its prevalence before Emancipation. Alexis de Tocqueville observed that “More mulattoes are to be seen in the South of the Union than in the North, but still they are infinitely more scarce than in any other European colony: mulattoes are by no means numerous in the United States.” Only 7.7% of slaves were mulattoes, which means whites fathered only a small percentage of slave children in the period from 1620 to 1850. Only 4.5% of the ex-slaves interviewed as part of the Federal Writers’ Project said one of their parents was white. Only 1% to 2% of plantation slaves were fathered by white men, while in the freer urban slave environment, almost 50% of slave children were fathered by white men. Frederick Douglass said urban slave life was almost like being free. These statistics indicate sexual exploitation was not common on the Southern plantation, and exploitation was not directly forced in the urban environment. Masters had absolute control on their own plantations; but in the city, the two races moved about more freely. Slaves and whites who were not bound to each other met one another more often in urban environments. Sexual liaisons were less likely in the city or town to be between white owners and their servants, and thus not likely to be the result of coercion. The white plantation mistress’s moral power was often missing or weakened in the city. The overriding power disparity between whites and blacks gave white males unquestioned sexual advantages. Capitalists in Cottonopolis had power over the daughters and wives of their factory workers, too, according to Engels: “If his wife or daughter finds favour in the eyes of the master, a command, a hint suffices, and she must place herself at his disposal.”

V. Financial Exploitation

While slaves consumed some 88% of their own production, according to the experts, 12% of their production went to the slaveholder as profit. In a sparsely populated continent with raw land, labor was the key. The stable workforce of highly controlled slaves, aided by division of labor and economies of scale, out-produced free labor on a per capita basis. The beneficiaries of all that organized hard work were the white owners, who consumed far more than they might have with their own physical labor. The plantation or workshop created wealth for their masters and substantial subsistence for slaves and their many progeny. The disparity of wealth was not as keenly felt during slavery. Slaves enjoyed many of the advantages of living on a prosperous country estate. Newly emancipated slaves generally had nothing but their clothes, a few possessions and perhaps a small amount of money. Whites retained the real estate and almost all of the personal property, most of which was earned with slave labor. Most started their free life during bad economic times with no material advantages. Those with character, discipline, industry, skill and good values survived or prospered; those without these intangibles never fare well. The lack of both education and property multiplied the disadvantages of freedpeople. They did not have an education to make the accumulation of property easier, nor property to subsidize a good education. If those disadvantages were not enough, many slaves lost the discipline and values they learned during bondage. Successful African-Americans overcame the intrinsic and principal injustices of antebellum slavery, yet the long-term cumulative effects of slavery remain, inextricably woven into complex developments and patterns and stretched across time.

VI. Anti-Black Racism

In antebellum slavery, there was a marked difference between slaves and their owners. This distinguished New World slavery from earlier slave systems. Earlier in history, slaves came from neighboring lands, areas that were close enough that racial characteristics did not vary drastically. With the advent of ocean-going ships, slaves increasingly came from great distances, namely from Africa where differences were more visual. Slaveholders used ideas of racial superiority and inferiority to rationalize slavery, then limited blacks’ opportunities to challenge this racist worldview. The racial divide was nearly an impenetrable wall. Some blacks became free and obtained their own slaves before Emancipation, but they were the exceptions. Racism did not disappear after Emancipation, and in fact increased in some ways, though it decreases now by the decade. Free blacks faced strong racism and a type of animosity not inflicted upon slaves. Racism in America was and is pervasive and dies hard.

VII. Alcoholic & Mentally Unstable Owners & Overseers

Whippings, rapes, the break-up of families, overwork and overpowering unhappiness were more likely to occur at less successful plantations, such as those where the master was mentally ill, an alcoholic, absent from the plantation or where slave management was by overseers of less ability or character. Masters who were unkind to their slaves were often mean to their own white families as well. “Slaves had a great dread, very naturally, of falling into the hands of drunken owners,” Frederick Douglass said. Delia Garlic’s master got drunk and ordered a beating, according to her slave narrative. Josiah Henson was owned by two alcoholics at different times; one died, the other was ruined financially. Harriet Beecher Stowe got it right in her characterization of Simon Legree as an alcoholic. The itinerant employment of overseers meant they were more likely to be alcoholics. Planters and overseers suffered from alcoholism more than their servants did because slaves only had restricted access to alcohol. Alcoholism affecting masters and overseers was one of the single greatest causes of slave misery. Frank Bell remembered: “Master he stay drunk nearly all time and was mean to his slave.” Alcoholism stands out in the Federal Writers’ Project Slave Narratives. Alcoholism destroyed domestic harmony on the plantation. Escaped slave Peter Bruner remembered the time when “my master commenced to drink whiskey and of course he grew meaner and meaner every day. Sometimes he would come home drunk and whip all of the slaves about the place. He would hit them with anything that he got hold of.” “Prophet” John Henry Kemp’s alcoholic master bragged about employing the meanest overseers. Solomon Northrup’s master was an alcoholic. Addiction to laudanum was also a threat to the happiness of the planter class, and the laudanum addicts “were disproportionally upper-class, southern, white, and female.” Slaves obviously could not afford laudanum and had no way to obtain it easily. Tom W. Woods’ master “was good and kind to all his slaves when he was sober, but he was awful crabbed and cross when he was drunk, and he was drunk most of de time.”

VIII. Absenteeism

Absentee slaveholding caused more misery than when the slaveholder was present on the plantation. Absentee slaveholders lost contact with actual conditions. One who owns and sees a valuable slave is interested in their long-term welfare; others are concerned with short-term goals. Overseers were generally crueler than slaveholders were, and had less power and authority over the slaves than the slaveholder. The overseer had a difficult job and tended to stay employed only for a few years. After firing overseers for cruelty, slaveholders often decided to personally administer all subsequent punishment.