American Negro Slavery by Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

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[Footnote 23: The working of these courts and the current criticisms of
them are illustrated in H.M. Henry _The Police Control of the Slave in
South Carolina_, pp. 58-65.]

[Footnote 24: News item from Newbern, N.C., in the Charleston _City
Gazette_, May 9, 1826.]

The circuit and supreme courts of the several states, though the slave
cases which they tried were for the most part concerned only with such dry
questions as detinue, trover, bailment, leases, inheritance and reversions,
in which the personal quality of the negroes was largely ignored,
occasionally rendered decisions of vivid human interest even where matters
of mere property were nominally involved. An example occurred in the case
of Rhame _vs_. Ferguson and Dangerfield, decided by the South Carolina
Court of Appeals in 1839 in connection with a statute enacted by the
legislature of that state in 1800 restricting manumissions and prescribing
that any slaves illegally set free might be seized by any person as
derelicts. George Broad of St. John's Parish, Berkeley County, had died
without blood relatives in 1836, bequeathing fourteen slaves and their
progeny to his neighbor Dangerfield "in trust nevertheless and for this
purpose only that the said John R. Dangerfield, his executors and assigns
do permit and suffer the said slaves ... to apply and appropriate
their time and labor to their own proper use and behoof, without the
intermeddling or interference of any person or persons whomsoever further
than may be necessary for their protection under the laws of this state";
and bequeathing also to Dangerfield all his other property in trust for the
use of these negroes and their descendants forever. These provisions were
being duly followed when on a December morning in 1837 Rebecca Rhame, the
remarried widow of Broad's late brother-in-law, descended upon the Broad
plantation in a buggy with John J. Singletary whom she had employed for the
occasion under power of attorney. Finding no white person at the residence,
Singletary ordered the negroes into the yard and told them they were seized
in Mrs. Rhame's behalf and must go with him to Charleston. At this juncture
Dangerfield, the trustee, came up and demanded Singletary's authority,
whereupon the latter showed him his power of attorney and read him the laws
under which he was proceeding. Dangerfield, seeking delay, said it would be
a pity to drag the negroes through the mud, and sent a boy to bring his
own wagon for them. While this vehicle was being awaited Colonel James
Ferguson, a dignitary of the neighborhood who had evidently been secretly
sent for by Dangerfield, galloped up, glanced over the power of attorney,
branded the whole affair as a cheat, and told Dangerfield to order
Singletary off the premises, driving him away with a whip if necessary, and
to shoot if the conspirators should bring reinforcements. "After giving
this advice, which he did apparently under great excitement, Ferguson rode
off." Singletary then said that for his part he had not come to take or
lose life; and he and his employer departed. Mrs. Rhame then sued Ferguson
and Dangerfield to procure possession of the negroes, claiming that she had
legally seized them on the occasion described. At the trial in the circuit
court, Singletary rehearsed the seizure and testified further that
Dangerfield had left the negroes customarily to themselves in virtually
complete freedom. In rebuttal, Dr. Theodore Gaillard testified that the
negroes, whom he described as orderly by habit, were kept under control
by the trustee and made to work. The verdict of the jury, deciding the
questions of fact in pursuance of the judge's charge as to the law, was in
favor of the defendants; and Mrs. Rhame entered a motion for a new trial.
This was in due course denied by the Court of Appeals on the ground that
Broad's will had clearly vested title to the slaves in Dangerfield, who
after Broad's death was empowered to do with them as he pleased. If he, who
was by the will merely trustee but by law the full owner, had given up
the practical dominion over the slaves and left them to their own
self-government they were liable to seizure under the law of 1800. This
question of fact, the court concluded, had properly been put to the jury
along with the issue as to the effectiveness of the plaintiff's seizure of
the slaves; and the verdict for the defendants was declared conclusive.[25]

[Footnote 25: Rebecca Rhame _vs_. James Ferguson and John R. Dangerfield,
in Rice, _Law Reports of South Carolina_, I, 196-203.]

This is the melodrama which the sober court record recites. The female
villain of the piece and her craven henchman were foiled by the sturdy
but wily trustee and the doughty Carolina colonel who, in headlong,
aristocratic championship of those threatened with oppression against
the moral sense of the community, charged upon the scene and counseled
slaughter if necessary in defense of negroes who were none of his. And
in the end the magistrates and jurors, proving second Daniels come to
judgment, endorsed the victory of benevolence over avarice and assured
the so-called slaves their thinly veiled freedom. Curiously, however, the
decision in this case was instanced by a contemporary traveller to prove
that negroes freed by will in South Carolina might be legally enslaved by
any person seizing them, and that the bequest of slaves in trust to an
executor as a merely nominal master was contrary to law;[26] and in later
times a historian has instanced the traveller's account in support of his
own statement that "Persons who had been set free for years and had no
reason to suppose that they were anything else might be seized upon for
defects in the legal process of manumission."[27]

[Footnote 26: J.S. Buckingham, _Slave States in America_, II, 32, 33.]

[Footnote 27: A.B. Hart, _Slavery and Abolition_ (New York, 1906), p. 88.]

Now according to the letter of certain statutes at certain times, these
assertions were severally more or less true; but if this particular case
and its outcome have any palpable meaning, it is that the courts connived
at thwarting such provisions by sanctioning, as a proprietorship valid
against the claim of a captor, what was in obvious fact a merely nominal
dominion.

Another striking case in which the severity of the law was overridden by
the court in sanction of lenient custom was that of Jones _vs_. Allen,
decided on appeal by the Supreme Court of Tennessee in 1858. In the fall of
the preceding year Jones had called in his neighbors and their slaves to
a corn husking and had sent Allen a message asking him to send help. Some
twenty-five white men and seventy-five slaves gathered on the appointed
night, among them Allen's slave Isaac. After supper, about midnight, Jones
told the negroes to go home; but Isaac stayed a while with some others
wrestling in the back yard, during which, while Jones was not present, a
white man named Hager stabbed Isaac to death. Allen thereupon sued Jones
for damages on the ground that the latter had knowingly and unlawfully
suffered Isaac, without the legally required authorization, to come with
other slaves upon his premises, where he had been slain to his owner's
loss. The testimony showed that Allen had not received Jones' message and
had given Isaac no permission to go, but that Jones had not questioned
Isaac in this regard; that Jones had given spirituous liquors to the slaves
while at work, Isaac included, but that no one there was intoxicated except
Hager who had come drunk and without invitation. In the trial court, in
Rutherford County where the tragedy had occurred, the judge excluded
evidence that such corn huskings were the custom of the country without the
requirement of written permission for the slaves attending, and he charged
the jury that Jones' employment of Isaac and Isaac's death on his premises
made him liable to Allen for the value of the slave. But on Jones' appeal
the Supreme Court overruled this, asserting that "under our modified form
of slavery slaves are not mere chattels but are regarded in the two-fold
character of persons and property; that as persons they are considered by
our law as accountable moral agents; ... that certain rights have been
conferred upon them by positive law and judicial determination, and other
privileges and indulgences have been conceded to them by the universal
consent of their owners. By uniform and universal usage they are
constituted the agents of their owners and sent on business without written
authority. And in like manner they are sent to perform those neighborly
good offices common in every community.... The simple truth is, such
indulgences have been so long and so uniformly tolerated, the public
sentiment upon the subject has acquired almost the force of positive law."
The judgment of the lower court was accordingly reversed and Jones was
relieved of liability for his laxness.[28]

[Footnote 28: Head's _Tennessee Reports_, I, 627-639.]

There were sharp limits, nevertheless, to the lenity of the courts. Thus
when one Brazeale of Mississippi carried with him to Ohio and there set
free a slave woman of his and a son whom he had begotten of her, and then
after taking them home again died bequeathing all his property to the
mulatto boy, the supreme court of the state, in 1838, declared the
manumission void under the laws and awarded the mother and son along with
all the rest of Brazeale's estate to his legitimate heirs who had brought
the suit.[29] In so deciding the court may have been moved by its
repugnance toward concubinage as well as by its respect for the statutes.

[Footnote 29: Howard's _Mississippi Reports_, II, 837-844.]

The killing or injury of a slave except under circumstances justified by
law rendered the offender liable both to the master's claim for damages
and to criminal prosecution; and the master's suit might be sustained even
where the evidence was weak, for as was said in a Louisiana decision, the
deed was "one rarely committed in presence of witnesses, and the most that
can be expected in cases of this kind are the presumptions that result from
circumstances."[30] The requirement of positive proof from white witnesses
in criminal cases caused many indictments to fail.[31] A realization of
this hindrance in the law deprived convicted offenders of some of the
tolerance which their crimes might otherwise have met. When in 1775, for
example, William Pitman was found guilty and sentenced by the Virginia
General Court to be hanged for the beating of his slave to death, the
_Virginia Gazette_ said: "This man has justly incurred the penalties of
the law and we hear will certainly suffer, which ought to be a warning to
others to treat their slaves with more moderation."[32] In the nineteenth
century the laws generally held the maiming or murder of slaves to be
felonies in the same degree and with the same penalties as in cases where
the victims were whites; and when the statutes were silent in the premises
the courts felt themselves free to remedy the defect.[33]

[Footnote 30: Martin, _Louisiana Reports_, XV, 142.]

[Footnote 31: H.M. Henry, _Police Control of the Slave in South Carolina_,
pp. 69-79.]

[Footnote 32: _Virginia Gazette_, Apr. 21, 1775, reprinted in the _William
and Mary College Quarterly_, VIII, 36.]

[Footnote 33: The State _vs_. Jones, in Walker, _Mississippi Reports_, p.
83, reprinted in J.D. Wheeler, _The Law of Slavery_, pp. 252-254.]

Despite the ferocity of the statutes and the courts, the fewness and the
laxity of officials was such that from time to time other agencies were
called into play. For example the maraudings of runaway slaves camped in
Belle Isle swamp, a score of miles above Savannah, became so serious and
lasting that their haven had to be several times destroyed by the Georgia
militia. On one of these occasions, in 1786, a small force first employed
was obliged to withdraw in the face of the blacks, and reinforcements
merely succeeded in burning the huts and towing off the canoes, while the
negroes themselves were safely in hiding. Not long afterward, however,
the gang was broken up, partly through the services of Creek and Catawba
Indians who hunted the maroons for the prices on their heads.[34] The
Seminoles, on the other hand, gave asylum to such numbers of runaways as to
prompt invasions of their country by the United States army both before
and after the Florida purchase.[35] On lesser occasions raids were made by
citizen volunteers. The swamps of the lower Santee River, for example, were
searched by several squads in 1819, with the killing of two negroes, the
capture of several others and the wounding of one of the whites as the
result.[36]

[Footnote 34: _Georgia Colonial Records_, XII, 325, 326; _Georgia Gazette_
(Savannah), Oct. 19, 1786; _Massachusetts Sentinel_ (Boston), June 13,
1787; _Georgia State Gazette and Independent Register_ (Augusta), June 16,
1787.]

[Footnote 35: Joshua R. Giddings, _The Exiles of Florida_ (Columbus, Ohio,
1858).]

[Footnote 36: Diary of Dr. Henry Ravenel, Jr., of St. John's Parish,
Berkeley County, S.C. MS. in private possession.]

More frequent occasions for the creation of vigilance committees were the
rumors of plots among the blacks and the reports of mischievous doings by
whites. In the same Santee district of the Carolina lowlands, for instance,
a public meeting at Black Oak Church on January 3, 1860, appointed three
committees of five members each to look out for and dispose of any
suspicious characters who might be "prowling about the parish." Of the
sequel nothing is recorded by the local diarist of the time except the
following, under date of October 25: "Went out with a party of men to take
a fellow by the name of Andrews, who lived at Cantey's Hill and traded with
the negroes. He had been warned of our approach and run off. We went on and
broke up the trading establishment."[37]

[Footnote 37: Diary of Thomas P. Ravenel, which is virtually a continuation
of the Diary just cited. MS. in private possession.]

Such transactions were those of the most responsible and substantial
citizens, laboring to maintain social order in the face of the law's
desuetude. A mere step further in that direction, however, lay outright
lynch law. Lynchings, indeed, while far from habitual, were frequent enough
to link the South with the frontier West of the time. The victims were not
only rapists[38] but negro malefactors of sundry sorts, and occasionally
white offenders as well. In some cases fairly full accounts of such
episodes are available, but more commonly the record extant is laconic.
Thus the Virginia archives have under date of 1791 an affidavit reciting
that "Ralph Singo and James Richards had in January last, in Accomac
County, been hung by a band of disguised men, numbering from six to
fifteen";[39] and a Georgia newspaper in 1860 the following: "It is
reported that Mr. William Smith was killed by a negro on Saturday evening
at Bowling Green, in Oglethorpe County. He was stabbed sixteen times. The
negro made his escape but was arrested on Sunday, and on Monday morning
a number of citizens who had investigated the case burnt him at the
stake."[40] In at least one well-known instance the mob's violence was
directed against an abuser of slaves. This was at New Orleans in 1834 when
a rumor spread that Madame Lalaurie, a wealthy resident, was torturing her
negroes. A great crowd collected after nightfall, stormed her door, found
seven slaves chained and bearing marks of inhuman treatment, and gutted
the house. The woman herself had fled at the first alarm, and made her way
eventually to Paris.[41] Had she been brought before a modern court it may
be doubted whether she would have been committed to a penitentiary or to
a lunatic asylum. At the hands of the mob, however, her shrift would
presumably have been short and sure.

[Footnote 38: For examples of these see above, pp. 460-463.]

[Footnote 39: _Calendar of Virginia State Papers_, V, 328.]

[Footnote 40: _Southern Banner_ (Athens, Ga.), June 14, 1860. Other
instances, gleaned mostly from _Niles' Register_ and the _Liberator_, are
given in J.E. Cutler, _Lynch Law_ (New York, 1905), pp. 90-136.]

[Footnote 41: Harriett Martineau, _Retrospect of Western Travel_ (London,
1838), I, 262-267; V. Debouchel, _Histoire de la Louisiane_ (New Orleans,
1841), p. 155; Alcee Fortier, _History of Louisiana_, III, 223.]

The violence of city mobs is a thing peculiar to no time or place. Rural
Southern lynch law in that period, however, was in large part a special
product of the sparseness of population and the resulting weakness of legal
machinery, for as Olmsted justly remarked in the middle 'fifties, the whole
South was virtually still in a frontier condition.[42] In _post bellum_
decades, on the other hand, an increase of racial antipathy has offset the
effect of the densification of settlement and has abnormally prolonged the
liability to the lynching impulse.

[Footnote 42: F.L. Olmsted, _Journey in the Back Country_, p. 413.]

While the records have no parallel for Madame Lalaurie in her systematic
and wholesale torture of slaves, there were thousands of masters and
mistresses as tolerant and kindly as she was fiendish; and these were
virtually without restraint of public authority in their benevolent rule.
Lawmakers and magistrates by personal status in their own plantation
provinces, they ruled with a large degree of consent and cooperation by the
governed, for indeed no other course was feasible in the long run by men
and women of normal type. Concessions and friendly services beyond the
countenance and contemplation of the statutes were habitual with those
whose name was legion. The law, for example, conceded no property rights
to the slaves, and some statutes forbade specifically their possession
of horses, but the following characteristic letter of a South Carolina
mistress to an influential citizen tells an opposite story: "I hope you
will pardon the liberty I take in addressing you on the subject of John,
the slave of Professor Henry, Susy his wife, and the orphan children of my
faithful servant Pompey, the first husband of Susy. In the first instance,
Pompey owned a horse which he exchanged for a mare, which mare I permitted
Susy to use after her marriage with John, but told them both I would sell
it and the young colt and give Susy a third of the money, reserving the
other two thirds for her children. Before I could do so, however, the
mare and the colt were exchanged and sent out of my way by this dishonest
couple. I then hoped at least to secure forty-five dollars for which
another colt was sold to Mr. Haskell, and sent my message to him to say
that Susy had no claim on the colt and that the money was to be paid to me
for the children of Pompey. A few days since I sent to Mr. Haskell again
who informed me that he had paid for the colt, and referred me to you. I do
assure you that whatever Susy may affirm, she has no right to the money.
It is not my intention to meddle with the law on the occasion, and I
infinitely prefer relying on you to do justice to the parties. My manager,
who will deliver this to you, is perfectly acquainted with all the
circumstances; and [if] after having a conversation with him you should
decide in favor of the children I shall be much gratified."[43]

[Footnote 43: Letter of Caroline Raoul, Belleville, S.C., Dec. 26, 1829, to
James H. Hammond. MS. among the Hammond papers in the Library of Congress.]

Likewise where the family affairs of slaves were concerned the silence and
passiveness of the law gave masters occasion for eloquence and activity.
Thus a Georgian wrote to a neighbor: "I have a girl Amanda that has your
servant Phil for a husband. I should be very glad indeed if you would
purchase her. She is a very good seamstress, an excellent cook--makes cake
and preserves beautifully--and washes and irons very nicely, and cannot be
excelled in cleaning up a house. Her disposition is very amiable. I have
had her for years and I assure you that I have not exaggerated as regards
her worth.... I will send her down to see you at any time."[44] That offers
of purchase were no less likely than those of sale to be prompted by such
considerations is suggested by another Georgia letter: "I have made every
attempt to get the boy Frank, the son of James Nixon; and in order to
gratify James have offered as far as five hundred dollars for him--more
than I would pay for any negro child in Georgia were it not James'
son."[45] It was therefore not wholly in idyllic strain that a South
Carolinian after long magisterial service remarked: "Experience and
observation fully satisfy me that the first law of slavery is that of
kindness from the master to the slave. With that ... slavery becomes a
family relation, next in its attachments to that of parent and child."[46]

[Footnote 44: Letter of E.N. Thompson, Vineville, Ga. (a suburb of Macon),
to J.B. Lamar at Macon, Ga., Aug. 7, 1854. MS. in the possession of Mrs.
A.S. Erwin, Athens, Ga.]

[Footnote 45: Letter of Henry Jackson, Jan. 11, 1837, to Howell Cobb. MS.
in the possession of Mrs. A.S. Erwin, Athens, Ga.]

[Footnote 46: J.B. O'Neall in J.B.D. DeBow ed., _Industrial Resources of
the South and West_, II (New Orleans, 1852), 278.]

On the whole, the several sorts of documents emanating from the Old
South have a character of true depiction inversely proportioned to their
abundance and accessibility. The statutes, copious and easily available,
describe a hypothetical regime, not an actual one. The court records are on
the one hand plentiful only for the higher tribunals, whither questions of
human adjustments rarely penetrated, and on the other hand the decisions
were themselves largely controlled by the statutes, perverse for ordinary
practical purposes as these often were. It is therefore to the letters,
journals and miscellaneous records of private persons dwelling in the
regime and by their practices molding it more powerfully than legislatures
and courts combined, that the main recourse for intimate knowledge must be
had. Regrettably fugitive and fragmentary as these are, enough it may be
hoped have been found and used herein to show the true nature of the living
order.

The government of slaves was for the ninety and nine by men, and only for
the hundredth by laws. There were injustice, oppression, brutality and
heartburning in the regime,--but where in the struggling world are these
absent? There were also gentleness, kind-hearted friendship and mutual
loyalty to a degree hard for him to believe who regards the system with a
theorist's eye and a partisan squint. For him on the other hand who has
known the considerate and cordial, courteous and charming men and women,
white and black, which that picturesque life in its best phases produced,
it is impossible to agree that its basis and its operation were wholly
evil, the law and the prophets to the contrary notwithstanding.

INDEX

Acklen, Joseph A.S.,
plantation home of
rules of, for overseers
Africa, West, _see_ Guinea
Agriculture, _see_ cotton, indigo, rice, sugar and tobacco
culture
Aiken, William, rice plantation of
Aime, Valcour, sugar plantation of
Amissa, enslaved and restored to Africa
Angolas,
tribal traits of
revolt of
Antipathy, racial,
Jefferson's views on
in Massachusetts
in North and South compared
Northern spokesmen of
Arabs, in the Guinea trade
Asiento
Azurara, Gomez E.

Baltimore, negro churches in
Barbados,
emigration from,
to Carolina
to Jamaica
founding of
planters' committee of
slave laws of,
sugar culture in
Belmead plantation
Benin
Black codes,
administration of
attitude of citizens toward
local ordinances
origin of,
in Barbados
in the Northern colonies
in Louisiana
in South Carolina
in Virginia
tenor of,
in the North
in the South
Bobolinks, in rice fields
Bonny
Bore, Etienne de, sugar planter
Bosman, William, in the Guinea trade
Branding of slaves
Bristol, citizens of, in the slave trade
Burial societies, negro
Burnside, John, merchant and sugar planter
Butler, Pierce,
the younger,
slaves of, sold

Cain, Elisha, overseer
Cairnes, J.E., views of, on slavery
Calabar, New
Calabar, Old
Cape Coast Castle
Capers, William, overseer
Capital, investment of, in slaves
Charleston, commerce of,
free negroes in
industrial census of
racial adjustments in, problem of
slave misdemeanors in
Denmark Vesey's plot
Churches,
racial adjustments in,
rural
urban
Clarkson, Thomas, views of, on the effects of closing the slave trade
Columbus, Christopher, policy of
Concubinage
Congoes, tribal traits of
Connecticut,
slavery in,
disestablishment of
Cooper, Thomas, views of, on the economics of slavery
Corbin, Richard, plantation rules of
Coromantees, conspiracy of,
tribal traits of
Corporations, ownership of slaves by
Cotton culture,
sea-island
introduction of,
methods and scale of
upland,
engrossment of thought and energy by
improvements in
methods and scale of
stimulates westward migration
Cotton gin, invention of
Cotton mills
slave operatives in
Cotton plantations, _see_ plantations, cotton
Cotton prices, sea-island,
upland,
chart facing
Cottonseed,
oil extracted from
used as fertilizer
Covington, Leonard, planter, migration of
Creoles, Louisiana
Criminality among free negroes
among slaves
Cuba