What Hath God Wrought (9 page)

Having developed an active prayer life in childhood under the guidance of her mother, Isabella grew into a fervent “Holiness” Methodist. Once free, she left her husband (who may have been chosen for her by their owner) and became an itinerant preacher. She warned of the Second Coming of Christ and demanded the abolition of slavery throughout the nation. In 1843, she adopted the name Sojourner Truth, appropriate for a traveling herald of the Divine Word. Although illiterate, she spoke powerfully and dictated a financially successful autobiography. Five feet eleven inches tall, with dark skin and a muscular frame, Sojourner Truth commanded attention from an audience. Her resonant voice had a New York working-class accent that never lost traces of the Dutch.
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Of all the many aspects of the early-modern global economy, none was more infamous or more wide-ranging in its consequences than the Atlantic slave trade. Both Great Britain and the United States had passed legislation in 1807 outlawing the traffic, already notorious for its cruelty, though the Spanish and Portuguese colonies of Latin America still permitted it, and the French West Indies winked at it. The trade had its origins in the post-Columbian demographic catastrophe, which created a severe labor shortage in the New World. European colonizers filled their demand for cheap labor by importing people from Africa. These consisted primarily of prisoners captured in wars between West African nations, supplemented by convicts and victims of kidnapping. The captives would be transported to the coast and sold to Europeans who had secured permission from local rulers to operate trading posts called “factories.” From there they embarked on the horrific transoceanic “middle passage” to the Western Hemisphere. As of 1815, more people had traveled to the New World from Africa via the slave trade than had come from Europe.
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In the United States, depopulation of the Native inhabitants left land inexpensive and widely available once British limitations on westward migration had been removed. Most free people preferred to secure a farm of their own rather than work on someone else’s land. Accordingly, large landowners had imported unfree laborers, first indentured Europeans and then enslaved Africans. Wars in North America, like those in West Africa, also produced captives to enslave, but not in great numbers. Ironically, America’s free land had promoted slavery—for much the same reason that the plentiful lands of Russia promoted serfdom.
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In 1815, of about 8.4 million people in the United States, almost 1.4 million were held in hereditary slavery, the personal property of their owners. During the colonial period, slavery had been legal in all the future United States, and challenges to its moral legitimacy were rare. But the Revolution popularized Enlightenment ideas, synthesized them with elements of Christianity, and summed them up in the affirmation that “all men are created equal,” in that all possess “unalienable rights.” By the early years of the nineteenth century, scarcely anyone outside the Deep South states of South Carolina and Georgia tried to justify slavery in principle. Public opinion in 1815 generally held the institution a regrettable evil, contrary to both Christianity and natural rights. However, in places with large African American populations, the whites worried that general emancipation would jeopardize white supremacy and threaten insurrection, and even where the black population was small, whites worried that freed people might become public charges. Nowhere were whites willing to be taxed to pay compensation to owners for freeing their slaves.

The legal regulation of slavery had been reserved to the states by the Constitution of 1787, and most Americans seem to have assumed that the several states would eventually find ways to eliminate the institution without undue difficulty. Pennsylvania and the New England states, where slavery had never been economically important, had abolished it, either suddenly or gradually, during the Revolution. Thousands also gained their own freedom then, escaping to the British army and sailing to other parts of the empire. Some black men had joined the rebel armed forces too, but in the South they were seldom welcomed as recruits. The Continental Congress prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territory in 1787, so when Ohio was admitted to the Union in 1803 it came in as a free state. New York and New Jersey, having more slaves, had waited until 1799 and 1804 respectively to start their gradual emancipations. According to the census of 1810 they still had twenty-six thousand enslaved residents. New Jersey’s process unfolded so slowly that the state contained a few hundred slaves as late as the 1840s. Isabella’s little boy was far from the only person illegally sold out of state during these long transition periods; kidnappers as well as unscrupulous masters committed that crime.
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The same ideological impulses that prompted northern state emancipations had prompted in the South extensive voluntary manumissions by individual masters, especially in Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. Reinforcing the appeal of liberty, it must be noted, was the depressed market for tobacco in the 1780s and ’90s. Many planters in the Chesapeake region had not yet identified a profitable alternative and found themselves owning more slaves than they knew what to do with. (“I have more working Negros,” complained George Washington, “than can be employed to any advantage in the farming system.”) Those who manumitted significant numbers included Washington himself and one of the largest slaveholders in Virginia, Robert Carter III.
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By 1815, this first wave of state and individual acts of liberation had largely run its course. Some Chesapeake planters had learned how to put slaves to work growing wheat instead of tobacco. Others sold slaves westward, from the Tidewater to the Piedmont or Kentucky. Delaware undertook no state emancipation program, even though it contained a mere four thousand slaves, three-quarters of its black population being already free. Some Virginians got worried about the number of free blacks in the commonwealth and secured a law requiring any slaves liberated in the future to leave the state. Most disturbing, the shipment of slaves from the existing states into the Louisiana Purchase had been permitted despite a strong effort led by Connecticut senator James Hillhouse to legislate against it. As a result many thousands had been sent off in bondage to Louisiana, even before its admission as a state, to grow sugarcane there.
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Nevertheless, the line between “free” and “slave” states was not yet sharply drawn in 1815. There were many freedpeople in Virginia, many still enslaved in New York. Hardly anyone would have predicted that no more states would undertake emancipation. For the time being, it seemed as if events could move in either a pro-or an antislavery direction, depending on political decisions.

Meanwhile, in the cities, owners often allowed slaves to “hire their own time” in return for a percentage of their earnings. After a number of years of this, bondsmen might save up enough to buy their freedom and that of their family members. By 1830, four-fifths of Baltimore’s black inhabitants were legally free. In the other metropolis of the South, New Orleans, the free proportion was two-fifths. In all American cities, slavery declined. Urban life proved less congenial to slavery than rural largely because masters found it difficult to control every aspect of the slave’s life in the city. Urban slaves were far more likely to make successful escapes. The shrewdest contemporaries came to regard the growth of cities as one of the factors undermining the persistence of slavery.
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The combination of state and individual liberations had given the United States a substantial population of free African Americans—approximately 200,000 by 1815. (Actually, more had been freed by individuals—generous masters, courageous escapees, or thrifty self-purchasers—than by state laws.) The large majority of “free Negroes” both North and South lived in cities, where they worked mostly in service occupations. Ironically, emancipated black workers sometimes found themselves excluded from skilled jobs that they had performed in slavery. In the ports, many went to sea: Twenty percent of the sailors in the U.S. merchant and whaling fleets were black.
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(Herman Melville would celebrate the racial diversity of the ship’s crew in
Moby-Dick
.) The urban African American communities provided their enslaved neighbors both an example of life in freedom and a haven where they might escape and find shelter. Generally excluded from Independence Day celebrations on July 4, the free black communities celebrated historical festivals of their own, observing the abolition of the slave trade, emancipation in New York, and (beginning in 1834) the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies. These communities provided the core audience for antislavery crusaders like Sojourner Truth and her co-workers of both races. Congregations like the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Zion, where Truth worshipped in New York City, became centers of black autonomy. Self-consciously respectable community leaders, often clergymen or businessmen, defended black rights to those outside and preached to those inside the virtues of literacy, hard work, and thrift—both for their own sake and to rebut white racial slurs.
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Sojourner Truth was a tall, strong woman, and the statistics that have survived show black Americans, like white Americans, taller on average than their Old World counterparts. They also had a high birthrate that produced a natural increase of 2 percent per annum, almost as high as that of the white population. (Young Isabella was the last of her parents’ ten or twelve children.) Alone among New World slave societies, the enslaved population of the United States grew independent of importations from overseas. The rice and sugarcane areas of South Carolina and Louisiana, however, constituted exceptions. There severe working conditions and disease environments resembled those in the West Indies, and the slave population had to be replenished by purchases from elsewhere in the country.
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The key factor in explaining both the Atlantic slave trade and the perpetuation of slavery in the United States was profitability. In the South, when a yeoman farmer purchased his first slave it usually signaled a resolve to emphasize production for the market, that is, for profit as opposed to family subsistence. Had short-staple cotton not emerged in the years after 1815 as an extremely profitable employment for slave labor, finding a peaceful, acceptable resolution to the problem of emancipation might not have been so difficult. Economic historians, after prodigious research and argument, have come to general agreement that Americans who invested in slave property usually made a competitive return on their investment. A lively commerce in slaves, both local and interstate, sustained the economic efficiency and profitability of the slave system. During the period 1790 to 1860, some 3 million slaves changed ownership by sale, many of them several times. Almost all slaveowners bought or sold slaves at some point in their lives. Slave ownership was widely dispersed and yet concentrated: One southern white family in three owned at least one slave; one in eight owned at least twenty, and this one-eighth owned well over half of all the slaves. Many whites who did not own slaves expected to acquire them later in life, and in the meantime might rent their services on a short-term or long-term basis. Thus even nonslaveowners could feel a direct interest in slavery as a system. Prices of slaves eventually rose far above their 1815 levels, primarily because of the demand for slave labor in the cotton fields, bringing substantial capital gains to the owners of slaves and demonstrating broad confidence in the security of that form of investment. Slavery became so profitable, in fact, that it crowded out other forms of investment in the South. By 1850, data show southern planters disproportionately numerous among the wealthiest Americans.
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Slaves being human beings and not machines, and their masters more than “economic men,” the two sometimes related to each other as fellow humans. Such relationships most frequently developed between masters and house servants, occasionally between masters and the elite of trusted, skilled supervisors and artisans. Aristotle, who of course lived amidst the practice of slavery, observed that although masters used their slaves as living tools, it was also possible to have between masters and slaves a limited degree of friendship.
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Among slaveholding Americans, small children of both races played together. Masters took an interest in their slaves’ personal lives and probably did not often realize how frequently their meddling was resented. Slaves took an interest in their masters’ personal lives and probably knew more than they let on. Sometimes slaves pretended more affection for the occupants of “the big house” than they felt; sometimes the affection was sincerely reciprocal. Sojourner Truth fondly remembered her former master John Dumont for his “kindness of heart.” But close personal relationships could be unpleasant as well as pleasant; Truth also recalled the abuse she secretly suffered from her mistress Sally Dumont with discreet shame and loathing.
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And always the suspicion lurked that the master (or his teenage son) was taking sexual advantage of the women and girls whose bodies he owned. President Madison’s sister commented in disgust that “a planter’s wife is but the mistress of a seraglio.”
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The African Americans had been Christians since the mid-eighteenth-century religious revival known as “the Great Awakening.” Most states abolished the importation of African slaves well before the federal government’s prohibition took effect in 1808, so African American culture had been evolving on its own for several generations by 1815. The religion of the slaves could underwrite either accommodation or resistance to white authority, but in either case it inspired spiritual strength. Within the Christian tradition as both masters and slaves understood it, they were equal in the sight of God. Many southern churches counted people of both races as members and referred to them in their records alike, as “Sister” or “Brother.” Sometimes a common religion helped individuals bridge the gulf separating them. William Wells Brown, who escaped from slavery in 1834, acknowledged “the greatest respect” for the devout planter John Gaines. Many a master echoed the heartfelt wish of Rodah Horton when an aged slave died in 1836, that “she has gone to a better world I hope.” Preachers frequently urged masters to deal justly and mercifully with their slaves (who might be listening to the sermon too). Counteracting whatever tendencies existed toward human relationships between slaves and masters, however, was a substantial body of advice on plantation management discouraging intimacy and fraternization as inimical to discipline and efficiency.
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