[Footnote 22: Columbian Museum and Savannah Advertiser (Savannah, Ga.),
Feb. 24, 1797.]
[Footnote 23: Paducah Kentuckian, quoted in the New Orleans Bee, Apr. 3, 1844.]
[Footnote 24: New Orleans Bee, Aug. 1, 1845, citing the Arkansas Southern Shield.]
[Footnote 25: New Orleans Daily Tropic, Feb. 16, 1846.]
If all such rumors as this, many of which had equally slight basis, were assembled, the catalogue would reach formidable dimensions. A large number doubtless escaped record, for the newspapers esteemed them "a delicate subject to touch";[26] and many of those which were recorded, we may be sure, have not come to the investigator's notice. A survey of the revolts and conspiracies and the rumors of such must nevertheless be attempted; for their influence upon public thought and policy, at least from time to time, was powerful.
[Footnote 26: Federal Union (Milledgeville, Ga.), Dec. 23, 1856, editorial.]
Early revolts were of course mainly in the West Indies, for these were long the chief plantation colonies. No more than twenty years after the first blacks were brought to Hispaniola a score of Joloff negroes on the plantation of Diego Columbus rose in 1622 and were joined by a like number from other estates, to carry death and desolation in their path until they were all cut down or captured.[27] In the English islands precedents of conspiracy were set before the blacks became appreciably numerous. A plot among the white indentured servants in Barbados in 1634 was betrayed and the ringleader executed;[28] and another on a larger scale in 1649 had a similar end.[29] Incoming negroes appear not to have taken a similar course until 1675 when a plot among them was betrayed by one of their number. The governor promptly appointed captains to raise companies, as a contemporary wrote,[30] "for repressing the rebels, which accordingly was done, and abundance taken and apprehended and since put to death, and the rest kept in a more stricter manner." This quietude continued only until 1692 when three negroes were seized on charge of conspiracy. One of these, on promise of pardon, admitted the existence of the plot and his own participation therein. The two others were condemned "to be hung in chains on a gibbet till they were starved to death, and their bodies to be burned." These endured the torture "for four days without making any confession, but then gave in and promised to confess on promise of life. One was accordingly taken down on the day following. The other did not survive." The tale as then gathered told that the slaves already pledged were enough to form six regiments, and that arrangements were on foot for the seizure of the forts and arsenal through bribery among their custodians. The governor when reporting these disclosures expressed the hope that the severe punishment of the leaders, together with a new act offering freedom as reward to future informers, would make the colony secure.[31] There seems to have been no actual revolt of serious dimensions in Barbados except in 1816 when the blacks rose in great mass and burned more than sixty plantations, as well as killing all the whites they could catch, before troops arrived from neighboring islands and suppressed them.[32]
[Footnote 27: J.A. Saco, Esclavitud en el Nuevo Mondo (Barcelona, 1879), pp. 131-133.]
[Footnote 28: Maryland Historical Society Fund Publications, XXXV.]
[Footnote 29: Richard Ligon, History of Barbados (London, 1657).]
[Footnote 30: Charles Lincoln ed., Narratives of the Indian Wars, 1675-1699 (New York, 1913), pp. 71, 72.]
[Footnote 31: Calendar of State Papers, America and West Indies, 1689-1692, pp. 732-734.]
[Footnote 32: Louisiana Gazette (New Orleans), June 17, 1816.]
In Jamaica a small outbreak in 1677[33] was followed by another, in Clarendon Parish, in 1690. When these latter insurgents were routed by the whites, part of them, largely Coromantees it appears, fled to the nearby mountain fastnesses where, under the chieftainship of Cudjoe, they became securely established as a community of marooned freemen. Welcoming runaway slaves and living partly from depredations, they made themselves so troublesome to the countryside that in 1733 the colonial government built forts at the mouths of the Clarendon defiles and sent expeditions against the Maroon villages. Cudjoe thereupon shifted his tribe to a new and better buttressed vale in Trelawney Parish, whither after five years more spent in forays and reprisals the Jamaican authorities sent overtures for peace. The resulting treaty, signed in 1738, gave recognition to the Maroons, assigned them lands and rights of hunting, travel and trade, pledged them to render up runaway slaves and criminals in future, and provided for the residence of an agent of the island government among the Maroons as their superintendent. Under these terms peace prevailed for more than half a century, while the Maroon population increased from 600 to 1400 souls. At length Major James, to whom these blacks were warmly attached, was replaced as superintendent by Captain Craskell whom they disliked and shortly expelled. Tumults and forays now ensued, in 1795, the effect of which upon the sentiment of the whites was made stronger by the calamitous occurrences in San Domingo. Negotiations for a fresh accommodation fell through, whereupon a conquest was undertaken by a joint force of British troops, Jamaican militia and free colored auxiliaries. The prowess of the Maroons and the ruggedness of their district held all these at bay, however, until a body of Spanish hunters with trained dogs was brought in from Cuba. The Maroons, conquered more by fright than by force, now surrendered, whereupon they were transported first to Nova Scotia and thence at the end of the century to the British protectorate in Sierra Leone.[34] Other Jamaican troubles of some note were a revolt in St. Mary's Parish in 1765,[35] and a more general one in 1832 in which property of an estimated value of $1,800,000 was destroyed before the rebellion was put down at a cost of some $700,000 more.[36] There were troubles likewise in various other colonies, as with insurgents in Antigua in 1701[37] and[38] 1736 and Martinique and Guadeloupe in 1752;[39] with maroons in Grenada in 1765,[40] Dominica in 1785[41] and Demarara in[42] 1794; and with conspirators in Cuba in 1825[43] and St. Croix[44] and Porto Rico in 1848.[45]
[Footnote 33: Calendar of State Papers, America and West Indies, 1689-1692, p. 101.]
[Footnote 34: R.C. Dallas, History of the Maroons (London, 1803).]
[Footnote 35: Gentleman's Magazine, XXXVI, 135.]
[Footnote 36: Niles' Register, XLIV, 124.]
[Footnote 37: Calendar of State Papers, America and West Indies, 1701, pp. 721, 722.]
[Footnote 38: South Carolina Gazette (Charleston), Jan. 29, 1837.]
[Footnote 39: Gentleman's Magazine, XXII, 477.]
[Footnote 40: Ibid., XXXV, 533.]
[Footnote 41: Charleston, S.C., Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, Jan. 26, 1786.]
[Footnote 42: Henry Bolinbroke, Voyage to the Demerary (Philadelphia, 1813), pp. 200-203.]
[Footnote 43: Louisiana Gazette, Oct. 12, 1825.]
[Footnote 44: New Orleans Bee, Aug. 7, 1848.]
[Footnote 45: Ibid., Aug. 16 and Dec. 15, 1848.]
Everything else of such nature, however, was eclipsed by the prodigious upheaval in San Domingo consequent upon the French Revolution. Under the flag of France the western end of that island had been converted in the course of the eighteenth century from a nest of buccaneers into the most thriving of plantation colonies. By 1788 it contained some 28,000 white settlers, 22,000 free negroes and mulattoes, and 405,000 slaves. It had nearly eight hundred sugar estates, many of them on a huge scale. The soil was so fertile and the climate so favorable that on many fields the sugar-cane would grow perennially from the same roots almost without end. Exports of coffee and cotton were considerable, of sugar and molasses enormous; and the volume was still rapidly swelling by reason of the great annual importations of African slaves. The colony was by far the most valued of the French overseas possessions.
Some of the whites were descendants of the original freebooters, and retained the temperament of their forbears; others were immigrant fortune seekers. The white women were less than half as numerous as the men, and black or yellow concubines were common substitutes for wives. The colony was the French equivalent of Jamaica, but more prosperous and more self-willed and self-indulgent. Its whites were impatient of outside control, and resolute that the slaves be ruled with iron hand and that the colored freemen be kept passive.
A plentiful discontent with bureaucracy and commercial restraint under the old régime caused the planters to welcome the early news of reform projects in France and to demand representation in the coming States General. But the rapid progress of radical republicanism in that assembly threw most of these into a royalist reaction, though the poorer whites tended still to endorse the Revolution. But now the agitations of the Amis des Noirs at Paris dismayed all the white islanders, while on the other hand the National Assembly's "Declaration of the Rights of Man," together with its decrees granting political equality in somewhat ambiguous form to free persons of color, prompted risings in 1791 among the colored freemen in the northern part of the colony and among the slaves in the center and south. When reports of these reached Paris, the new Legislative Assembly revoked the former measures by a decree of September 24, 1791, transferring all control over negro status to the colonial assemblies. Upon receiving news of this the mulattoes and blacks, with the courage of despair, spread ruin in every district. The whites, driven into the few fortified places, begged succor from France; but the Jacobins, who were now in control at Paris, had a programme of their own. By a decree of April 4, 1792, the Legislative Assembly granted full political equality to colored freemen and provided for the dispatch of Republican commissioners to establish the new régime. The administration of the colony by these functionaries was a travesty. Most of the surviving whites emigrated to Cuba and the American continent, carrying such of their slaves as they could command. The free colored people, who at first welcomed the commissioners, unexpectedly turned against them because of a decree of August 29, 1793, abolishing slavery.
At this juncture Great Britain, then at war with the French Republic, intervened by sending an army to capture the colony. Most of the colored freemen and the remaining whites rallied to the flag of these invaders; but the slaves, now commanded by the famous Toussaint L'Ouverture, resisted them effectually, while yellow fever decimated their ranks and paralyzed their energies. By 1795 the two colored elements, the mulattoes who had improvised a government on a slaveholding basis in the south, and the negroes who dominated the north, each had the other alone as an active enemy; and by the close of the century the mulattoes were either destroyed or driven into exile; and Toussaint, while still acknowledging a nominal allegiance to France, was virtual monarch of San Domingo. The peace of Amiens at length permitted Bonaparte to send an army against the "Black Napoleon." Toussaint soon capitulated, and in violation of the amnesty granted him was sent to his death in a French dungeon. But pestilence again aided the blacks, and the war was still raging when the breach of the peace in Europe brought a British squadron to blockade and capture the remnant of the French army. The new black leader, Dessalines, now proclaimed the colony's independence, renaming it Hayti, and in 1804 he crowned himself emperor. In the following year any further conflict with the local whites was obviated by the systematic massacre of their small residue. In the other French islands the developments, while on a much smaller scale, were analogous.[46]
[Footnote 46: T. Lothrop Stoddard, The French Revolution in San Domingo
(Boston, 1914).]
In the Northern colonies the only signal disturbances were those of 1712 and 1741 at New York, both of which were more notable for the frenzy of the public than for the formidableness of the menace. Anxiety had been recurrent among the whites, particularly since the founding of a mission school by Elias Neau in 1704 as an agent of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. The plot was brewed by some Coromantee and Paw Paw negroes who had procured the services of a conjuror to make them invulnerable; and it may have been joined by several Spanish or Portuguese Indians or mestizoes who had been captured at sea and unwarrantably, as they contended, reduced to slavery. The rebels to the number of twenty-three provided themselves with guns, hatchets, knives and swords, and chose the dark of the moon in the small hours of an April night to set a house afire and slaughter the citizens as they flocked thither. But their gunfire caused the governor to send soldiers from the Battery with such speed that only nine whites had been killed and several others wounded when the plotters were routed. Six of these killed themselves to escape capture; but when the woods were beaten and the town searched next day and an emergency court sat upon the cases, more captives were capitally sentenced than the whole conspiracy had comprised. The prosecuting officer, indeed, hounded one of the prisoners through three trials, to win a final conviction after two acquittals. The maxim that no one may twice be put in jeopardy for the same offense evidently did not apply to slaves in that colony. Of those convicted one was broken on the wheel, another hanged alive in chains; nineteen more were executed on the gallows or at the stake, one of these being sentenced "to be burned with a slow fire, that he may continue in torment for eight or ten hours and continue burning in said fire until he be dead and consumed to ashes"; and several others were saved only by the royal governor's reprieve and the queen's eventual pardon. Such animosity was exhibited by the citizens toward the "catechetical school" that for some time its teacher hardly dared show himself on the streets. The furor gradually subsided, however, and Mr. Neau continued his work for a dozen years longer, and others carried it on after his death.[47]
[Footnote 47: E.B. O'Callaghan ed., Documents Relative to the Colonial
History of New York, V, 341, 342, 346, 356, 357, 371; New York
Genealogical and Biographical Record, XXI, 162, 163; New Orleans Daily
Delta, April 1, 1849; J.A. Doyle, English Colonies in America (New York,
1907), V, pp. 258, 259.]
The commotion of 1741 was a panic among the whites of high and low degree, prompted in sequel to a robbery and a series of fires by the disclosures of Mary Burton, a young white servant concerning her master John Hughson, and the confessions of Margaret Kerry, a young white woman of many aliases but most commonly called Peggy, who was an inmate of Hughson's disreputable house and a prostitute to negro slaves. When Mary testified under duress that Hughson was not only a habitual recipient of stolen goods from the negroes but was the head of a conspiracy among them which had already effected the burning of many houses and was planning a general revolt, the supreme court of the colony began a labor of some six months' duration in bringing the alleged plot to light and punishing the alleged plotters.[48] Hughson and his wife and the infamous Peggy were promptly hanged, and likewise John Ury who was convicted of being a Catholic priest as well as a conspirator; and twenty-nine negroes were sent with similar speed either to the gallows or the stake, while eighty others were deported. Some of the slaves made confessions after conviction in the hope of saving their lives; and these, dubious as they were, furnished the chief corroborations of detail which the increasingly fluent testimony of Mary Burton received. Some of the confessions, however, were of no avail to those who made them. Quack and Cuffee, for example, terror-stricken at the stake, made somewhat stereotyped revelations; but the desire of the officials to stay the execution with a view to definite reprieve was thwarted by their fear of tumult by the throng of resentful spectators. After a staggering number of sentences had been executed the star witness raised doubts against herself by her endless implications, "for as matters were then likely to turn out there was no guessing where or when there would be an end of impeachments."[49] At length she named as cognizant of the plot several persons "of known credit, fortune and reputations, and of religious principles superior to a suspicion of being concerned in such detestable practices; at which the judges were very much astonished."[50] This farcical extreme at length persuaded even the obsessed magistrates to stop the tragic proceedings.
[Footnote 48: Daniel Horsmanden, one of the magistrates who sat in these trials, published in 1744 the 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; and this, reprinted under the title, The New York Conspiracy, or a History of the Negro Plot (New York, 1810), is the chief source of knowledge in the premises. See also the contemporary letters of Lieutenant-Governor Clarke in E.B. O'Callaghan, ed., Documents Relative to the Colonial History of New York, VI, 186, 197, 198, 201-203.]
[Footnote 49: Ibid., pp. 96-100.]
[Footnote 50: Ibid., pp. 370-372.]
In New Jersey in 1734 a slave at Raritan when jailed for drunkenness and insolence professed to reveal a plot for insurrection, whereupon he and a fellow slave were capitally convicted. One of them escaped before execution, but the other was hanged.[51] In Pennsylvania as late as 1803 a negro plot at York was detected after nearly a dozen houses had been burnt and half as many attempts had been made to cause a general conflagration. Many negroes were arrested; others outside made preparations to release them by force; and for several days a reign of terror prevailed. Upon the restoration of quiet, twenty of the prisoners were punished for arson.[52]
[Footnote 51: MS. transcript in the New York Public Library from the New
York Gazette, Mch. 18, 1734.]
[Footnote 52: E.R. Turner, The Negro in Pennsylvania, pp. 152, 153.]
In the Southern colonies there were no outbreaks in the seventeenth century and but two discoveries of plots, it seems, both in Virginia. The first of these, 1663, in which indented white servants and negro slaves in Gloucester County were said to be jointly involved, was betrayed by one of the servants. The colonial assembly showed its gratification not only by freeing the informer and giving him five thousand pounds of tobacco but by resolving in commemoration of "so transcendant a favour as the preserving all we have from so utter ruin," "that the 13th. of September be annually kept holy, being the day those villains intended to put the plot in execution."[53] The other plot, of slaves alone, in the "Northern Neck" of the colony in 1687, appears to have been of no more than local concern.[54] The punishments meted out on either occasion are unknown.
[Footnote 53: Hening, Virginia Statutes at Large, II, 204.]
[Footnote 54: J.C. Ballagh, History of Slavery in Virginia (Baltimore, 1902), p. 79.]
The eighteenth century, with its multiplication of slaves, saw somewhat more frequent plots in its early decades. The discovery of one in Isle of Wight County, Virginia, in 1709 brought thirty-nine lashes to each of three slaves and fifty lashes to a free negro found to be cognizant, and presumably more drastic punishments to two other slaves who were held as ringleaders to await the governor's order. Still another slave who at least for the time being escaped the clutches of the law was proclaimed an outlaw.[55] The discovery of another plot in Gloucester and Middlesex Counties of the same colony in 1723 prompted the assembly to provide for the deportation to the West Indies of seven slave participants.[56]
[Footnote 55: Calendar of Virginia State Papers, I, 129, 130.]
[Footnote 56: Journals of the House of Burgesses of Virginia, 1712-1726, p. 36.]
In South Carolina, although depredations by runaways gave acute uneasiness in 1711 and thereabouts, no conspiracy was discovered until 1720 when some of the participants were burnt, some hanged and some banished.[57] Matters were then quiet again until 1739 when on a September Sunday a score of Angola blacks with one Jonny as their leader broke open a store, supplied themselves with arms, and laid their course at once for Florida where they had been told by Spanish emissaries welcome and liberty awaited them. Marching to the beat of drums, slaughtering with ease the whites they came upon, and drawing black recruits to several times their initial number, on the Pon Pon road that day the rebels covered ten prosperous miles. But when at evening they halted to celebrate their exploits with dancing and plundered rum they were set upon by the whites whom couriers had collected. Several were killed in the onslaught, and a few more were captured on the spot. Most of the rest fled back to their cabins, but a squad of ten made their way thirty miles farther on the route to Florida and sold their lives in battle when overtaken. Of those captured on the field or in their quarters some were shot but none were tortured. The toll of lives lost numbered twenty-one whites and forty-four[58] blacks.
[Footnote 57: Letter of June 24, 1720, among the MS. transcripts in the state capitol at Columbia of documents in the British Public Record Office.]
[Footnote 58: Gentleman's Magazine, X, 127; South Carolina Historical Society Collections, II, 270; Alexander Hewatt, Historical Account of South Carolina and Georgia (London, 1779), II, 72, 73. Joshua Coffin in his Account of Some of the Principal Slave Insurrections (New York, 1860) listed a revolt at Savannah, Ga., in 1728. But Savannah was not founded until 1733, and it contained virtually no negroes prior to 1750.]
Following this and the New York panic of two years later, there was remarkable quiet in race relations in general for a full half century. It was not indeed until the spread of the amazing news from San Domingo and the influx thence of white refugees and their slaves that a new series of disturbances began on the continent. At Norfolk in 1792 some negroes were arrested on suspicion of conspiracy but were promptly discharged for lack of evidence;[59] and close by at Portsmouth in the next year there were such savage clashes between the newly come French blacks and those of the Virginia stock that citizens were alarmed for their own safety.[60] In Louisiana an uprising on the plantation of Julien Poydras in Pointe Coupée Parish in 1796 brought the execution of a dozen or two negroes and sentences to prison of several whites convicted as their accomplices;[61] and as late as 1811 an outbreak in St. Charles and St. James Parishes was traced in part to San Domingo slaves.[62]
[Footnote 59: Calendar of Virginia State Papers, V, 540, 541, 546.]
[Footnote 60: Ibid., VI, 490, letter of a citizen who had just found four strange negroes hanging from the branches of a tree near his door.]
[Footnote 61: C.C. Robin, Voyages (Paris, 1806), II, 244 ff.; E.P.
Puckett, "Free Negroes in Louisiana" (MS.).]
[Footnote 62: M Puckett, op. cit. Le Moniteur de la Louisiane (New Orleans), Feb. 11, 1811, has mention of the manumission of a mulatto slave at this time on the ground of his recent valiant defence of his master's house against attacking insurgents.]
Gabriel's rising in the vicinity of Richmond, however, eclipsed all other such events on the continent in this period. Although this affair was of prodigious current interest its details were largely obscured by the secrecy maintained by the court and the legislature in their dealings with it. Reports in the newspapers of the time were copious enough but were vague except as to the capture of the leading participants; and the reminiscent journalism of after years was romantic to the point of absurdity. It is fairly clear, however, that Gabriel and other slaves on Thomas H. Prosser's plantation, which lay several miles distant from Richmond, began to brew the conspiracy as early as June, 1800, and enlisted some hundreds of confederates, perhaps more than a thousand, before September 1, the date fixed for its maturity. Many of these were doubtless residents of Richmond, and some it was said lived as far away as Norfolk. The few muskets procured were supplemented by cutlasses made from scythe blades and by plantation implements of other sorts; but the plan of onslaught contemplated a speedy increase of this armament. From a rendezvous six miles from Richmond eleven hundred men in three columns under designated officers were to march upon the city simultaneously, one to seize the penitentiary which then served also as the state arsenal, another to take the powder magazine in another quarter of the town, and the third to begin a general slaughter with such weapons as were already at hand.
Things progressed with very little hitch until the very eve of the day set. But then two things occurred, either of which happening alone would probably have foiled the project. On the one hand a slave on Moseley Sheppard's plantation informed his master of the plot; on the other hand there fell such a deluge of rain that the swelling of the streams kept most of the conspirators from reaching the rendezvous. Meanwhile couriers had roused the city, and the rebels assembled could only disperse. Scores of them were taken, including eventually Gabriel himself who eluded pursuit for several weeks and sailed to Norfolk as a stowaway. The magistrates, of course, had busy sessions, but the number of death sentences was less than might have been expected. Those executed comprised Gabriel and five other Prosser slaves along with nineteen more belonging to other masters; and ten others, in scattered ownership, were deported. To provide for a more general riddance of suspected negroes the legislature made secret overtures to the federal government looking to the creation of a territorial reservation to receive such colonists; but for the time being this came to naught. The legislature furthermore created a permanent guard for the capitol, and it liberated at the state's expense Tom and Pharaoh, slaves of the Sheppard family, as reward for their services in helping to foil the plot.[63]
[Footnote 63: T.W. Higginson, "Gabriel's Defeat," in the Atlantic Monthly, X, 337-345, reprinted in the same author's Travellers and Outlaws (Boston, 1889), pp. 185-214; J.C. Ballagh, History of Slavery in Virginia, p. 92; J.H. Russell, The Free Negro in Virginia, p. 65; MS. vouchers in the Virginia State Library recording public payments for convicted slaves.]
Set on edge by Gabriel's exploit, citizens far and wide were abnormally alert for some time thereafter; and perhaps the slaves here and there were unusually restive. Whether the one or the other of these conditions was most responsible, revelations and rumors were for several years conspicuously numerous. In 1802 there were capital convictions of fourteen insurgent or conspiring slaves in six scattered counties of Virginia;[64] and panicky reports of uprisings were sent out from Hartford and Bertie Counties, North Carolina.[65] In July, 1804, the mayor of Savannah received from Augusta "information highly important to the safety, peace and security" of his town, and issued appropriate orders to the local militia.[66] Among rumors flying about South Carolina in this period, one on a December day in 1805 telling of risings above and below Columbia led to the planting of cannon before the state house there and to the instruction of the night patrols to seize every negro found at large. An over-zealous patrolman thereupon shot a slave who was peacefully following his own master, and was indicted next day for murder. The peaceful passing of the night brought a subsidence of the panic with the coming of day.[67]
[Footnote 64: Vouchers as above.]
[Footnote 65: Augusta, Ga., Chronicle, June 26, 1802.]
[Footnote 66: Thomas Gamble, Jr., History of the City Government of
Savannah [Savannah, 1900], p. 68.]
[Footnote 67: "Diary of Edward Hooker," in the American Historical
Association Report for 1896, pp. 881, 882.]
In Virginia, again, there were disturbing rumors at one place or another every year or two from 1809 to 1814,[68] but no occurrence of tangible character until the Boxley plot of 1816 in Spottsylvania and Louisa Counties. George Boxley, the white proprietor of a country store, was a visionary somewhat of John Brown's type. Participating in the religious gatherings of the negroes and telling them that a little white bird had brought him a holy message to deliver his fellowmen from bondage, he enlisted many blacks in his project for insurrection. But before the plot was ripe it was betrayed by a slave woman, and several negroes were arrested. Boxley thereupon marched with a dozen followers on a Quixotic errand of release, but on the road the blacks fell away, and he, after some time in hiding, surrendered himself. Six of the negroes after conviction were hanged and a like number transported; but Boxley himself broke jail and escaped.[69]
[Footnote 68: Calendar of Virginia State Papers, X, 62, 63, 97, 368.]
[Footnote 69: Ibid., X, 433-436; Louisiana Gazette (New Orleans), Apr. 18 and 24 (Reprinting a report from the Virginia Herald of Mch. 9), and July 12, 1816; MS. Vouchers in the Virginia State Library recording public payments for convicted slaves.]
In the lower South a plot at Camden, South Carolina, in 1816[70] and another at Augusta, Georgia,[71] three years afterward had like plans of setting houses afire at night and then attacking other quarters of the respective towns when the white men had left their homes defenceless. Both plots were betrayed, and several participants in each were executed. These conspiracies were eclipsed in turn by the elaborate Vesey plot at Charleston in 1822, which, for the variety of the negro types involved, the methods of persuasion used by the leading spirits and the sobriety of the whites on the occasion is one of the most notable of such episodes on record.
[Footnote 70: [Edwin C. Holland], A Refutation of the Calumnies circulated against the Southern and Western States, with historical notes of insurrections (Charleston, 1822), pp. 75-77; H.T. Cook, Life and Legacy of David R. Williams, p. 131; H.M. Henry, Police Control of the Slave in South Carolina, pp. 151, 152.]
[Footnote 71: News item from Augusta in the Louisiana Courier (New
Orleans), June 15, 1819.]
Denmark Vesey, brought from Africa in his youth, had bought his freedom with part of a $1500 prize drawn by him in a lottery, and was in this period an independent artisan. Harboring a deep resentment against the whites, however, he began to plan his plot some four years before its maturity. He familiarized himself with the Bible account of the deliverance of the children of Israel, and collected pamphlet and newspaper material on anti-slavery sentiment in England and the North and on occurrences in San Domingo, with all of which on fit occasions he regaled the blacks with whom he came into touch. Arguments based on such data brought concurrence of negroes of the more intelligent sort, prominent among whom were certain functionaries of the African Church who were already nursing grievances on the score of the suppression of their ecclesiastical project by the Charleston authorities.[72] The chief minister of that church, Morris Brown, however, was carefully left out of the conspiracy. In appealing to the more ignorant and superstitious element, on the other hand, the services of Gullah Jack, so called because of his Angola origin, were enlisted, for as a recognized conjuror he could bewitch the recalcitrant and bestow charmed crabs' claws upon those joining the plot to make them invulnerable. In the spring of 1822 things were put in train for the outbreak. The Angolas, the Eboes and the Carolina-born were separately organized under appropriate commanders; arrangements were made looking to the support of the plantation slaves within marching distance of the city; and letters were even sent by the negro cook on a vessel bound for San Domingo with view apparently both to getting assistance from that island and to securing a haven there in case the revolt should prove only successful enough to permit the seizure of the ships in Charleston harbor. Meanwhile the coachmen and draymen in the plot were told off to mobilize the horses in their charge, pikes were manufactured, the hardware stores and other shops containing arms were listed for special attention, and plans were laid for the capture of the city's two arsenals as the first stroke in the revolt. This was scheduled for midnight on Sunday, June 16.
[Footnote 72: See above, p. 421.]
On May 30 George, the body-servant of Mr. Wilson, told his master that Mr. Paul's William had invited him to join a society which was to make a stroke for freedom. William upon being seized and questioned by the city council made something of a confession incriminating two other slaves, Mingo Harth and Peter Poyas; but these were so staunch in their denials that they were discharged, with confidential slaves appointed to watch them. William was held for a week of solitary confinement, at the end of which he revealed the extensive character of the plot and the date set for its maturity. The city guard was thereupon strengthened; but the lapse of several days in quiet was about to make the authorities incredulous, when another citizen brought them word from another slave of information precisely like that which had first set them on the qui vive. This caused the local militia to be called out to stiffen the patrol. Then as soon as the appointed Sunday night had passed, which brought no outbreak, the city council created a special court as by law provided, comprising two magistrates together with five citizens carefully selected for their substantial character and distinguished position. These were William Drayton, Nathaniel Heyward, James R. Pringle, James Legaré and Robert J. Turnbull. More sagacious and responsible men could certainly not have been found. A committee of vigilance was also appointed to assist the court.
This court having first made its own rules that no negro was to be tried except in the presence of his master or attorney, that everyone on trial should be heard in his own defense, and that no one should be capitally sentenced on the bare testimony of a single witness, proceeded to the trial of Peter Poyas, Denmark Vesey and others against whom charges had then been lodged. By eavesdropping those who were now convicted and confronting them with their own words, confessions were procured implicating many others who in turn were put on trial, including Gullah Jack whose necromancy could not save him. In all 130 negroes were arrested, including nine colored freemen. Of the whole number, twenty-five were discharged by the committee of vigilance and 27 others by the court. Nine more were acquitted with recommendations with which their masters readily complied, that they be transported. Of those convicted, 34 were deported by public authority and 35 were hanged. In addition four white men indicted for complicity, comprising a German peddler, a Scotchman, a Spaniard and a Charlestonian,[73] were tried by a regular court having jurisdiction over whites and sentenced to prison terms ranging from three to twelve months.
[Footnote 73: An Account of the late intended Insurrection among a portion of the Blacks of this City. Published by the Authority of the Corporation of Charleston (Charleston, 1822); Lionel H. Kennedy and Thomas Parker (the presiding magistrates of the special court), An Official Report of the Trials of sundry Negroes charged with an attempt to raise an insurrection, with a report of the trials of four white persons on indictments for attempting to excite the slaves to insurrection (Charleston, 1822); T.D. Jervey, Robert Y. Hayne and His Times (New York, 1909), pp. 130-136.]
A number of Charleston citizens promptly memorialized the state assembly recommending that all free negroes be expelled, that the penalties applicable to whites conspiring with negroes be made more severe, and that the control over the blacks be generally stiffened.[74] The legislature complied except as to the proposal for expulsion. Charlestonians also organized an association for the prevention of negro disturbances; but by 1825 the public seems to have begun to lose its ardor in the premises.[75]
[Footnote 74: Memorial of the Citizens of Charleston to the Senate and House of Representatives of the State of South Carolina (Charleston, 1822), reprinted in Plantation and Frontier, II, 103-116.]
[Footnote 75: Address of the association, in the Charleston City Gazette,
Aug. 5, 1825.]
The next salient occurrence in the series was the outbreak which brought fame to Nat Turner and the devoted Virginia county of Southampton. Nat, a slave who by the custom of the country had acquired the surname of his first master, was the foreman of a small plantation, a Baptist exhorter capable of reading the Bible, and a pronounced mystic. For some years, as he told afterward when in custody, he had heard voices from the heavens commanding him to carry on the work of Christ to make the last to be first and the first last; and he took the sun's eclipse in February, 1831, as a sign that the time was come. He then enlisted a few of his fellows in his project, but proceeded to spend his leisure for several months in prayer and brooding instead of in mundane preparation. When at length on Sunday night, August 21, he began his revolt he had but a petty squad of companions, with merely a hatchet and a broad-axe as weapons, and no definite plan of campaign. First murdering his master's household and seizing some additional equipment, he took the road and repeated the process at whatever farmhouses he came upon. Several more negroes joined the squad as it proceeded, though in at least one instance a slave resisted them in defense of his master's family at the cost of his own life. The absence of many whites from the neighborhood by reason of their attendance at a camp-meeting across the nearby North Carolina line reduced the number of victims, and on the other hand made the rally of the citizens less expeditious and formidable when the alarm had been spread. By sunrise the rebels numbered fifteen, part of whom were mounted, and their outfit comprised a few firearms. Throughout the morning they continued their somewhat aimless roving, slaughtering such white households as they reached, enlisting recruits by persuasion or coercion, and heightening their courage by draughts upon the apple-brandy in which the county, by virtue of its many orchards and stills, abounded. By noon there were some sixty in the straggling ranks, but when shortly afterward they met a squad of eighteen rallying whites, armed like themselves mainly with fowling pieces with birdshot ammunition, they fled at the first fire, and all but a score dispersed. The courage of these whites, however, was so outweighed by their caution that Nat and his fellows were able to continue their marauding course in a new direction, gradually swelling their numbers to forty again. That night, however, a false alarm stampeded their bivouac and again dispersed all the faint-hearted. Nat with his remaining squad then attacked a homestead just before daybreak on Tuesday, but upon repulse by the five white men and boys with several slave auxiliaries who were guarding it they retreated only to meet a militia force which completed the dispersal. All were promptly killed or taken except Nat who secreted himself near his late master's home until his capture was accomplished six weeks afterward. The whites slain by the rebels numbered ten men, fourteen women and thirty-one children.
The militia in scouring the countryside were prompted by the panic and its vindictive reaction to shoot down a certain number of innocent blacks along with the guilty and to make display of some of their severed heads. The magistrates were less impulsive. They promptly organized a court comprising all the justices of the peace in the county and assigned attorneys for the defense of the prisoners while the public prosecutor performed his appointed task. Forty-seven negroes all told were brought before the court. As to the five free blacks included in this number the magistrates, who had only preliminary jurisdiction in their cases, discharged one and remanded four for trial by a higher court. Of the slaves four, and perhaps a fifth regarding whom the record is blank, were discharged without trial, and thirteen more were acquitted. Of those convicted seven were sentenced to deportation, and seventeen with the ringleader among them, to death by hanging. In addition there were several slaves convicted of complicity in neighboring counties.[76]
[Footnote 76: W.S. Drewry, Slave Insurrections in Virginia, 1830-1865 (Washington, 1900), recounts this revolt in great detail, and gives a bibliography. The vouchers in the Virginia archives record only eleven executions and four deportations of Southampton slaves in this period. It may be that the rest of those convicted were pardoned.]
This extraordinary event, occurring as it did after a century's lapse since last an appreciable number of whites on the continent had lost their lives in such an outbreak, set nerves on edge throughout the South, and promptly brought an unusually bountiful crop of local rumors. In North Carolina early in September it was reported at Raleigh that the blacks of Wilmington had burnt the town and slaughtered the whites, and that several thousand of them were marching upon Raleigh itself.[77] This and similarly alarming rumors from Edenton were followed at once by authentic news telling merely that conspiracies had been discovered in Duplin and Sampson Counties and also in the neighborhood of Edenton, with several convictions resulting in each locality.[78]
[Footnote 77: News item dated Warrenton, N.C., Sept. 15, 1831, in the New
Orleans Mercantile Advertiser, Oct. 4, 1831.]
[Footnote 78: Federal Union (Milledgeville, Ga.), Oct. 6, 1831, citing the Fayetteville, N.C. Observer of Sept. 14; Niles' Register, XLI, 266.]
At Milledgeville, the village capital of Georgia where in the preceding year the newspapers and the town authorities had been fluttered by the discovery of incendiary pamphlets in a citizen's possession,[79] a rumor spread on October 4, 1831, that a large number of slaves had risen a dozen miles away and were marching upon the town to seize the weapons in the state arsenal there. Three slaves within the town, and a free mulatto preacher as well, were seized on suspicion of conspiracy but were promptly discharged for lack of evidence, and the city council soon had occasion, because there had been "considerable danger in the late excitement … by persons carrying arms that were intoxicated" to order the marshal and patrols to take weapons away from irresponsible persons and enforce the ordinance against the firing of guns in the streets.[80] Upon the first coming of the alarm the governor had appointed Captain J.A. Cuthbert, editor of the Federal Union, to the military command of the town; and Cuthbert, uniformed and armed to the teeth, dashed about the town all day on his charger, distributing weapons and stationing guards. Upon the passing of the baseless panic Seaton Grantland, customarily cool and sardonic, ridiculed Cuthbert in the Southern Recorder of which he was editor. Cuthbert retorted in his own columns that Grantland's conduct in the emergency had proved him a skulking coward.[81] No blood was shed, even among the editors.
[Footnote 79: Federal Union, Aug. 7, 1830; American Historical
Association Report for 1904, I. 469.]
[Footnote 80: American Historical Association Report for 1904, pp. 469, 470.]
[Footnote 81: Federal Union, Oct. 6 and 13 and Dec. 1, 1831.]
There were doubtless episodes of such a sort in many other localities.[82] It was evidently to this period that the reminiscences afterward collected by Olmsted applied. "'Where I used to live,'" a backwoodsman formerly of Alabama told the traveller, "'I remember when I was a boy—must ha' been about twenty years ago—folks was dreadful frightened about the niggers. I remember they built pens in the woods where they could hide, and Christmas time they went and got into the pens, 'fraid the niggers was risin'.' 'I remember the same time where we were in South Carolina,' said his wife, 'we had all our things put up in bags, so we could tote 'em if we heerd they was comin' our way.'"[83]
[Footnote 82: The discovery of a plot at Shelbyville, Tennessee, was reported at the end of 1832. Niles' Register, XLI, 340.]
[Footnote 83: F.L. Olmsted, A Journey in the Back Country (New York, 1863), p. 203.]
Another sort of sequel to the Southampton revolt was of course a plenitude of public discussion and of repressive legislation. In Virginia a flood of memorials poured upon the legislature. Petitions signed by 1,188 citizens in twelve counties asked for provision for the expulsion of colored freemen; others with 398 signatures from six counties proposed an amendment to the United States Constitution empowering Congress to aid Virginia to rid herself of all the blacks; others from two colonization societies and 366 citizens in four counties proposed the removal first of the free negroes and then of slaves to be emancipated by private or public procedure; 27 men of Buckingham and Loudon Counties and others in Albemarle, together with the Society of Friends in Hanover and 347 women, prayed for the abolition of slavery, some on the post nati plan and others without specification of details.[84] The House of Delegates responded by devoting most of its session of that winter to an extraordinarily outspoken and wide-ranging debate on the many phases of the negro problem, reflecting and elaborating all the sentiments expressed in the petitions together with others more or less original with the members themselves. The Richmond press reported the debate in great detail, and many of the speeches were given a pamphlet circulation in addition.[85] The only tangible outcome there and elsewhere, however, was in the form of added legal restrictions upon the colored population, slave and free. But when the fright and fervor of the year had passed, conditions normal to the community returned. On the one hand the warnings of wiseacres impressed upon the would-be problem solvers the maxim of the golden quality of silence, particularly while the attacks of the Northern abolitionists upon the general Southern régime were so active. On the other hand the new severities of the law were promptly relegated, as the old ones had been, to the limbo of things laid away, like pistols, for emergency use, out of sight and out of mind in the daily routine of peaceful industry.
[Footnote 84: The Letter of Appomattox to the People of Virginia: Exhibiting a connected view of the recent proceedings in the House of Delegates on the subject of the abolition of slavery and a succinct account of the doctrines broached by the friends of abolition in debate, and the mischievous tendency of those proceedings and doctrines (Richmond, 1832). These letters were first published in the Richmond Enquirer, February 4, 1832 et seqq.]
[Footnote 85: The debate is summarized in Henry Wilson, History of the
Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America (Boston, 1872), I, 190-207.]
In the remaining ante-bellum decades, though the actual outbreaks were negligible except for John Brown's raid, the discoveries, true or false, and the rumors, mostly unwarranted, were somewhat more frequent than before. Revelations in Madison County, Mississippi, in 1835 shortly before July 4, told of a conspiracy of whites and blacks scheduled for that day as a ramification of the general plot of the Murrell gang recently exposed.[86] A mass meeting thereupon appointed an investigating committee of thirteen citizens with power to apply capital punishment; and several whites together with ten or fifteen blacks were promptly put to death.[87]
[Footnote 86: See above, pp. 381, 382.]
[Footnote 87: The Liberator (Boston, Mass.), Aug. 8, 1835, quoting the
Clinton, Miss., Gazette of July 11.]
Widespread rumors at the beginning of the following December that a general uprising was in preparation for the coming holiday season caused the summons of citizens in various Georgia counties to mass meetings which with one accord recommended special precautions by masters, patrols and militia, and appointed committees of vigilance. In this series the resolutions adopted in Washington County are notable especially for the tone of their preamble. Mentioning the method recently followed in Mississippi only to disapprove it, this preamble ran: "We would fain hope that the soil of Georgia may never be reddened or her people disgraced by the arbitrary shedding of human blood; for if the people allow themselves but one participation in such lawless proceedings, no human sagacity can foretell where the overwhelming deluge will be staid or what portions of our state may feel its desolating ruin. This course of protection unhinges every tie of social and civil society, dissolves those guards which the laws throw around property and life, and leaves every individual, no matter how innocent, at the sport of popular passion, the probable object of popular indignation, and liable to an ignominious death. Therefore we would recommend to our fellow-citizens that if any facts should be elicited implicating either white men or negroes in any insurrectionary or abolition movements, that they be apprehended and delivered over to the legal tribunals of the country for full and fair judicial trial."[88] At Clarksville, Tennessee, uneasiness among the citizens on the score of the negroes employed in the iron works thereabout was such that they procured a shipment of arms from the state capital in preparation for special guard at the Christmas season.[89]
[Footnote 88: Federal Union (Milledgeville, Ga.), Dec. 11, 1835. At Darien on the Georgia coast Edwin C. Roberts, an Englishman by birth, was committed for trial in the following August for having told slaves they ought to be free and that half of the American people were in favor of their freedom. The local editor remarked when reporting the occurrence: "Mr. Roberts should thank his stars that he did not commence his crusade in some quarters where Judge Lynch presides. Here the majesty of the law is too highly respected to tolerate the jurisdiction of this despotic dignitary." Darien Telegraph, Aug. 30, quoted in the Federal Union, Sept. 6, 1836.]
[Footnote 89: MS. petition with endorsement noting the despatch of arms, in the state archives at Nashville.]
In various parts of Louisiana in this period there was a succession of plots discovered. The first of these, betrayed on Christmas Eve, 1835, involved two white men, one of them a plantation overseer, along with forty slaves or more. The whites were promptly hanged, and doubtless some of the blacks likewise.[90] The next, exposed in the fall of 1837, was in the neighborhood of Alexandria. Nine slaves and three free negroes were hanged in punishment,[91] and the negro Lewis who had betrayed the conspiracy was liberated at state expense and was voted $500 to provide for his security in some distant community.[92] The third was in Lafayette and St. Landry Parishes, betrayed in August, 1840, by a slave woman named Lecide who was freed by her master in reward. Nine negroes were hanged. Four white men who were implicated, but who could not be convicted under the laws which debarred slave testimony against whites, were severely flogged under a lynch-law sentence and ordered to leave the state.[93] Rumors of other plots were spread in West Feliciana Parish in the summer of 1841,[94] in several parishes opposite and above Natchez in the fall of 1842,[95] and at Donaldsonville at the beginning of 1843;[96] but each of these in turn was found to be virtually baseless. Meanwhile at Augusta, Georgia, several negroes were arrested in February, 1841, and at least one of them was sentenced to death. A petition was circulated for his respite as an inducement for confession; but other citizens, disquieted by the testimony already given, prepared a counter petition asking the governor to let the law take its course. The plot as described contemplated the seizure of the arsenal and the firing of the city in facilitation of massacre.[97]
[Footnote 90: Niles' Register, XLIX, 331.]
[Footnote 91: Ibid., LIII, 129.]
[Footnote 92: Louisiana, Acts of 1838, p. 118.]
[Footnote 93: Niles' Register, LXIX, 39, 88; E.P. Puckett, "Free Negroes in Louisiana" (MS.).]
[Footnote 94: New Orleans Bee, July 23, 29 and 31, 1841.]
[Footnote 95: Niles' Register, LXIII, 212.]
[Footnote 96: Louisiana Courier (New Orleans), Jan. 27 and Feb. 17, 1843.]
[Footnote 97: Letter of Mrs. S.A. Lamar, Augusta, Ga., Feb. 25, 1841, to
John B. Lamar at Macon. MS. in the possession of Mrs. A.S. Erwin, Athens,
Ga.]
The rest of the 'forties and the first half of the 'fifties were a period of comparative quiet; but in 1855 there were rumors in Dorchester and Talbot Counties, Maryland,[98] and the autumn of 1856 brought widespread disturbances which the Southern whites did not fail to associate with the rise of the Republican Party. In the latter part of that year there were rumors afloat from Williamsburg, Virginia, and Montgomery County in the same state, from various quarters of Tennessee, Arkansas and Texas, from New Orleans, and from Atlanta and Cassville, Georgia.[99] A typical episode in the period was described by a schoolmaster from Michigan then sojourning in Mississippi. One night about Christmas of 1858 when the plantation homestead at which he was staying was filled with house guests, a courier came in the dead of night bringing news that the blacks in the eastern part of the county had risen in a furious band and were laying their murderous course in this direction. The head of the house after scanning the bulletin, calmly told his family and guests that they might get their guns and prepare for defense, but if they would excuse him he would retire again until the crisis came. The coolness of the host sent the guests back to bed except for one who stood sentry. "The negroes never came."[100]
[Footnote 98: J.R. Brackett, The Negro in Maryland, p. 97.]
[Footnote 99: Southern Watchman (Athens, Ga.), Dec. 18 and 25, 1856. Some details of the Texas disturbance, which brought death to several negroes, is given in documents printed in F.L. Olmsted, Journey through Texas, pp. 503. 504]
[Footnote 100: A. DePuy Van Buren, Jottings of a Sojourn in the South
(Battle Creek, Mich., 1859), pp. 121, 122]
The shiver which John Brown's raid sent over the South was diminished by the failure of the blacks to join him, and it was largely overcome by the wave of fierce resentment against the abolitionists who, it was said, had at last shown their true colors. The final disturbance on the score of conspiracy among the negroes themselves was in the summer of 1860 at Dallas, Texas, where in the preceding year an abolitionist preacher had been whipped and driven away. Ten or more fires which occurred in one day and laid much of the town in ruins prompted the seizure of many blacks and the raising of a committee of safety. This committee reported to a public meeting on July 24 that three ringleaders in the plot were to be hanged that afternoon. Thereupon Judge Buford of the district court addressed the gathering. "He stated in the outset that in any ordinary case he would be as far from counselling mob law as any other man, but in the present instance the people had a clear right to take the law in their own hands. He counselled moderation, and insisted that the committee should execute the fewest number compatible with the public safety." [101]
[Footnote 101: Federal Union (Milledgeville, Ga.), Aug. 21, 1860, quoting the Nashville Union.]
On the whole it is hardly possible to gauge precisely the degree of popular apprehension in the premises. John Randolph was doubtless more picturesque than accurate when he said, "the night bell never tolls for fire in Richmond that the mother does not hug the infant more closely to her bosom."[102] The general trend of public expressions laid emphasis upon the need of safeguards but showed confidence that no great disasters were to be feared. The revolts which occurred and the plots which were discovered were sufficiently serious to produce a very palpable disquiet from time to time, and the rumors were frequent enough to maintain a fairly constant undertone of uneasiness. The net effect of this was to restrain that progress of liberalism which the consideration of economic interest, the doctrines of human rights and the spirit of kindliness all tended to promote.
[Footnote 102: H.A. Garland, Life of John Randolph, I, 295.]
CHAPTER XXIII
THE FORCE OF THE LAW
In many lawyers' briefs and court decisions it has been said that slavery could exist only by force of positive legislation.[1] This is not historically valid, for in virtually every American community where it existed at all, the institution was first established by custom alone and was merely recognized by statutes when these came to be enacted. Indeed the chief purpose of the laws was to give sanction and assurance to the racial and industrial adjustments already operative.
[Footnote 1: The source of this error lies doubtless in Lord Mansfield's famous but fallacious decision of 1772 in the Somerset case, which is recorded in Howell's State Trials, XX, § 548. That decision is well criticized in T.R.R. Cobb, An Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery in the United States of America (vol. I, all published, Philadelphia and Savannah, 1858), pp. 163-175.
Cobb's treatise, though dealing with slaves as persons only and not as property, is the best of the general analyses of the legal phase of the slaveholding régime. A briefer survey is in the Cyclopedia of Law and Procedure, William Mack ed., XXXVI (New York, 1910), 465-495. The works of G.M. Stroud, A Sketch of the Laws Relating to Slavery in the Several States (Philadelphia, 1827), and William Goodell, The American Slave Code in Theory and Practice (New York, 1853), are somewhat vitiated by the animus of their authors.
The many statutes concerning slavery enacted in the several colonies, territories and states are listed and many of them summarized in J.C. Hurd, The Law of Freedom and Bondage in the United States (Boston, 1858), I, 228-311; II, 1-218. Some hundreds of court decisions in the premises are given in J.D. Wheeler, A Practical Treatise on the Law of Slavery (New York and New Orleans, 1837); and all the thousands of decisions of published record are briefly digested in The Century Edition of the American Digest, XLIV (St. Paul, 1903), 853-1152.
The development of the slave code in Virginia is traced in J.C. Ballagh, A History of Slavery in Virginia (Baltimore, 1902), supplemented by J.H. Russell, The Free Negro in Virginia (Baltimore, 1913); and the legal régime of slavery in South Carolina at the middle of the nineteenth century is described by Judge J.B. O'Neall in The Industrial Resources of the Southern and Western States, J.B.D. DeBow ed., II (New Orleans, 1853), 269-292.]
As a rule each slaveholding colony or state adopted early in its career a series of laws of limited scope to meet definite issues as they were successively encountered. Then when accumulated experience had shown a community that it had a general problem of regulation on its hands its legislature commonly passed an act of many clauses to define the status of slaves, to provide the machinery of their police, and to prescribe legal procedure in cases concerning them whether as property or as persons. Thereafter the recourse was again to specific enactments from time to time to supplement this general or basic statute as the rise of new circumstances or policies gave occasion. The likeness of conditions in the several communities and the difficulty of devising laws to comply with intricate custom and at the same time to guard against apprehended ills led to much intercolonial and interstate borrowing of statutes. A perfect chain of this sort, with each link a basic police law for slaves in a separate colony or state, extended from Barbados through the southeastern trio of commonwealths on the continent. The island of Barbados, as we have seen, was the earliest of the permanent English settlements in the tropics and one of the first anywhere to attain a definite régime of plantations with negro labor. This made its assembly perforce a pioneer in slave legislation. After a dozen minor laws had been enacted, beginning in 1644, for the control of negroes along with white servants and for the recapture of runaways, the culmination in a general statute came in 1688. Its occasion, as recited in the preamble, was the dependence of plantation industry upon great numbers of negro slaves whose "barbarous, wild and savage nature … renders them wholly unqualified to be governed by the laws, customs and practices of our nation," and the "absolutely necessary consequence that such other constitutions, laws and orders should be in this island framed and enacted for the good regulating and ordering of them as may … restrain the disorders, rapines and inhumanities to which they are naturally prone and inclined, with such encouragements and allowances as are fit and needful for their support, that … this island through the blessing of God thereon may be preserved, His Majesty's subjects in their lives and fortunes secured, and the negroes and other slaves be well provided for and guarded against the cruelties and insolences of themselves or other ill-tempered people or owners."
The statute itself met the purposes of the preamble unevenly. The slaves were assured merely in annual suits of clothing, and the masters were given claim for pecuniary compensation for slaves inveigled away or illegally killed by other freemen; but the main concern of the statute was with routine control and the punishment of slave malfeasances. No slaves were to leave their masters' premises at any time unless in company with whites or when wearing servants' livery or carrying written passes, and offenders in this might be whipped and taken into custody by any white persons encountering them. No slaves were to blow horns or beat drums; and masters were to have their negro houses searched at frequent intervals for such instruments, as well as for weapons, runaway slaves and stolen goods. Runaways when caught were to be impounded, advertised and restored to their masters upon payment of captors' and custodians' fees. Trading with slaves was restricted for fear of encouraging theft. A negro striking a white person, except in lawful defense of his master's person, family or goods, was criminally punishable, though merely with lashes for a first offense; and thefts to the value of more than a shilling, along with all other serious infractions, were capital crimes. Negro transgressors were to be tried summarily by courts comprising two justices of the peace and three freeholders nearest the crime and were to be punished immediately upon conviction. To dissuade masters from concealing the crimes of their negroes the magistrates were to appraise each capitally convicted slave, within a limit of £25, and to estimate also the damage to the person or property injured by the commission of the crime. The colonial treasurer was then to take the amount of the slave's appraisal from the public funds and after making reimbursement for the injury done, pay the overplus, if any, to the criminal's owner. If it appeared to the magistrates, however, that the crime had been prompted by the master's neglect and the slave's consequent necessity for sustenance, the treasurer was to pay the master nothing. A master killing his own slave wantonly was to be fined £15, and any other person killing a slave illegally was to pay the master double the slave's value, to be fined £25, and to give bond for subsequent good behavior. If a slave were killed by accident the slayer was liable only to suit by the owner. The destruction of a slave's life or limb in the course of punishment by his master constituted no legal offense, nor did the killing of one by any person, when found stealing or attempting a theft by night. Ascertained hiding places of runaway slaves were to be raided by constables and posses, and these were to be rewarded for taking the runaways alive or dead.[2] This act was thenceforward the basic law in the premises as long as slavery survived in the island.
[Footnote 2: Richard Hall ed., Acts Passed in the Island of Barbados from 1643 to 1762 inclusive (London. 1764), pp. 112-121.]
South Carolina, in a sense the daughter of Barbados and in frequent communication with her, had enacted a series of specific laws of her own devising, when the growth of her slave population prompted the adoption of a general statute for negro police. Thereupon in 1712 her assembly copied virtually verbatim the preamble and some of the ensuing clauses of the Barbadian act of 1688, and added further provisions drawn from other sources or devised for the occasion. This served as her basic law until the shock of the Stono revolt in 1739 prompted the legislature to give the statute a greater elaboration in the following year. The new clauses, aside from one limiting the work which might be required by masters to fourteen and fifteen hours per day in winter and summer respectively, and another forbidding all but servants in livery to wear any but coarse clothing, were concerned with the restraint of slaves, mainly with a view to the prevention of revolt. No slaves were to be sold liquors without their masters' approval; none were to be taught to write; no more than seven men in a group were to travel on the high roads unless in company with white persons; no houses or lands were to be rented to slaves, and no slaves were to be kept on any plantation where no white person was resident.[3]
[Footnote 3: Cooper and McCord, Statutes at Large of South Carolina, VII, 408 ff.]
This act, supplemented by curfew and patrol laws and variously amended in after years, as by the enhancement of penalties for negroes convicted of striking white persons and by the requirement that masters provide adequate food as well as clothing, was never repealed so long as slavery continued to exist in South Carolina. Though its sumptuary clauses, along with various others, were from first to last of no effect, the statute as a whole so commended itself to the thought of slaveholding communities that in 1770 Georgia made it the groundwork of her own slave police; Florida in turn, by acts of 1822 and 1828, adopted the substance of the Georgia law as revised to that period; and in lesser degree still other states gave evidence of the same influence. Complementary legislation in all these jurisdictions meanwhile recognized slaves as property, usually of chattel character and with children always following the mother's condition, debarred negro testimony in court in all cases where white persons were involved, and declared the juridical incapacity of slaves in general except when they were suing for freedom. Contemporaneously and by similar methods, a parallel chain of laws, largely analogous to those here noted, was extended from Virginia, herself a pioneer in slave legislation, to Maryland, Delaware and North Carolina and in a fan-spread to the west as far as Missouri and Texas.[4]
[Footnote 4: The beginning of Virginia's pioneer slave code has been sketched in chapter IV above; and the slave legislation of the Northern colonies and states in chapters VI and VII.]
Louisiana alone in all the Union, because of her origin and formative experience as a Latin colony, had a scheme of law largely peculiar to herself. The foundation of this lay in the Code Noir decreed by Louis XV for that colony in 1724. In it slaves were declared to be chattels, but those of working age were not to be sold in execution of debt apart from the lands on which they worked, and neither husbands and wives nor mothers and young children were to be sold into separate ownership under any circumstances. All slaves, furthermore, were to be baptized into the Catholic church, and were to be exempt from field work on Sundays and holidays; and their marriages were to be legally recognized. Children, of course, were to follow the status and ownership of their mothers. All slaves were to be adequately clothed and fed, under penalty of confiscation, and the superannuated were to be maintained on the same basis as the able-bodied. Slaves might make business contracts under their masters' approval, but could not sue or be sued or give evidence against whites, except in cases of necessity and where the white testimony was in default. They might acquire property legally recognized as their own when their masters expressly permitted them to work or trade on their personal accounts, though not otherwise. Manumission was restricted only by the requirement of court approval; and slaves employed by their masters in tutorial capacity were declared ipso facto free. In police regards, the travel and assemblage of slaves were restrained, and no one was allowed to trade with them without their masters' leave; slaves were forbidden to have weapons except when commissioned by their masters to hunt; fugitives were made liable to severe punishments, and free negroes likewise for harboring them. Negroes whether slave or free, however, were to be tried by the same courts and by the same procedure as white persons; and though masters were authorized to apply shackles and lashes for disciplinary purpose, the killing of slaves by them was declared criminal even to the degree of murder.[5]
[Footnote 5: This decree is printed in Le Code Noir (Paris, 1742), pp. 318-358, and in the Louisiana Historical Society Collections, IV, 75-90. The prior decree of 1685 establishing a slave code for the French West Indies, upon which this for Louisiana was modeled, may be consulted in L. Peytraud, L'Esclavage aux Antilles Françaises (Paris, 1897), pp. 158-166.]
Nearly all the provisions of this relatively liberal code were adopted afresh when Louisiana became a territory and then a state of the Union. In assimilation to Anglo-American practice, however, such recognition as had been given to slave peculium was now withdrawn, though on the other hand slaves were granted by implication a legal power to enter contracts for self-purchase. Slave marriages, furthermore, were declared void of all civil effect; and jurisdiction over slave crimes was transferred to courts of inferior grade and informal procedure. By way of reciprocation the state of Alabama when framing a new slave code in 1852 borrowed in a weakened form the Louisiana prohibition of the separate sale of mothers and their children below ten years of age. This provision met the praise of citizens elsewhere when mention of it chanced to be published; but no other commonwealth appears to have adopted it.[6]
[Footnote 6: E. g., Atlanta Intelligencer, Feb. 27, 1856.]
The severity of the slave laws in the commonwealths of English origin, as compared with the mildness of the Louisiana code, was largely due to the historic possession by their citizens of the power of local self-government. A distant autocrat might calmly decree such regulations as his ministers deemed proper, undisturbed by the wishes and apprehensions of the colonial whites; but assemblymen locally elected and responsive to the fears as well as the hopes of their constituents necessarily reflected more fully the desire of social control, and preferred to err on the side of safety. If this should involve severity of legislative repression for the blacks, that might be thought regrettable and yet be done without a moment's qualm. On the eve of the American Revolution a West Indian writer explained the régime. "Self preservation," said he, "that first and ruling principle of human nature, alarming our fears, has made us jealous and perhaps severe in our threats against delinquents. Besides, if we attend to the history of our penal laws relating to slaves, I believe we shall generally find that they took their rise from some very atrocious attempts made by the negroes on the property of their masters or after some insurrection or commotion which struck at the very being of the colonies. Under these circumstances it may very justly be supposed that our legislatures when convened were a good deal inflamed, and might be induced for the preservation of their persons and properties to pass severe laws which they might hold over their heads to terrify and restrain them."[7] In the next generation an American citizen wrote in similar strain and with like truthfulness: "The laws of the slaveholding states do not furnish a criterion for the character of their present white population or the condition of the slaves. Those laws were enacted for the most part in seasons of particular alarm produced by attempts at insurrection, or when the black inhabitants were doubly formidable by reason of the greater proportion which they bore to the whites in number and the savage state and unhappy mood in which they arrived from Africa. The real measure of danger was not understood but after long experience, and in the interval the precautions taken were naturally of the most jealous and rigorous aspect. That these have not all been repealed, or that some of them should be still enforced, is not inconsistent with an improved spirit of legislation, since the evils against which they were intended to guard are yet the subject of just apprehension."[8]