Slave Life in the South

¶ … slave life in the South and North colonies/states from the 1680's to the Civil War. A great wealth of slave narratives exist in print today, a legacy of the slaves' experience in both the North and South in America. Reading them gives a graphic introduction into the lives of early African-Americans, from what they suffered to how they maintained their dignity, hope, and wishes for freedom even in their darkest and most miserable hours.

A got Mother Wit instead of an education. Lots of colored people in offices and school don't seem to know what Mother Wit is. Well, it's like this: I got a wit to teach me what's wrong. I got a wit to not make me a mischief-maker. I got a wit to keep people's trusts.'"

So begins a compellation of slave narratives taken down by Louisiana writers in the 1920s and 1930s. Many of these narratives come from ancient African-Americans who survived first hand the last days of slavery and still had vivid memories of their former lives as slaves. Many of the narratives paint a picture of smart and educated men and women who struggled for their freedom and inherently knew slavery was wrong. Peter Barber, an ex-slave interviewed by a Louisiana writer remembered his escape from Virginia during the Civil War. He and a friend ran away to Cincinnati, and Barber ended up working on steamships on the Mississippi River after the war ended and he gained his freedom.

Slavery existed in both the North and the South, but it predominated in the South, and most of the slaves who created narratives wrote of their lives in the South. An exception is Phyllis Wheatley, a slave who lived in Boston and is known for writing poetry, actually the first female black American poet. Her owners taught her to read and write, and encouraged her writing poetry, an experience very different from most slaves' experiences in the South. In the South, education was discouraged, and many slaves learned to read in secret, keeping their talents undisclosed from their masters, who often feared knowledge in their slaves.

In the North, slaves worked in homes or in businesses for the most part, while in the South, most slaves worked in agriculture. The culture of the South was based on agriculture, not industry, and the types of crops they grew, sugar cane, tobacco, and cotton, all required heavy manual labor to be successful. The slaves were crucial to the southern economy, and that is why they were so much more prevalent in the South than in the North. The North supported slavery as it was forming, but by the late 1700s to early 1800s, anti-slave sentiment began to grow in the North, and it abolished slavery in northern states long before the Civil War. Thus, slaves in the North generally had a better experience than slaves in the South, and often, they were freed by their masters, as Wheatley was, before she died.

Many people believe slaves were treated better in the North, simply because they did not have to work in the fields like the southern slaves, but research indicates that is not the case. There are accounts of northern slaves being shackled, beaten, and separated from their families, just as southern slaves were. Slaves were openly sold in the streets of many northern towns, and while the North abolished slavery first, there were still thousand of blacks living in the North, and many of them still served as slaves for their masters, even up to the Civil War.

After the slave trade was abolished in the North, slave owners had to find new ways of adding to their slave rolls, so they actively encouraged slave "breeding" for sheer manpower purposes. This occurred in the early history of the North, as well - there are accounts of masters actively breeding their slaves like animals in order to add to their own slave numbers or to sell them before the slave trade was fully established in New England. Again, this is often seen as a southern institution, but accounts and research indicate it often took places in the North, as well. Slavery did not remain in the North not because of the northerners growing repugnance to the institution, but because the economy and landscape were far different from the South, and they did not support slavery nearly as well as the South did. By the 1800s and right up to the Civil War, there was growing sentiment against slavery, but that was not the case in the 1600s and much of the 1700s, when slavery was common up North, too.

While many of these narratives were written by the slaves themselves, some were transcribed from slave recollections and then written and edited by whites, which would obviously offer a very different view of slavery during this time. "The Confessions of Nat Turner" is one of these narratives, written by Thomas R. Gray after Turner's capture after he led a slave rebellion in Southampton, Virginia. Turner's narrative departs from many other slave writings, because he speaks of being treated kindly by his master (who he murders anyway), and of being "instructed" by visions and religious beliefs to rise up against the whites. His experience is far different from most other slaves in their narratives, where slaves dealt with abuse and violence by running away, rather than rising up against their masters. This is evidenced by William and Ellen Craft, two slaves from Georgia who escaped and made their way to safety in Philadelphia. They moved on to Boston, but always faced the threat of recapture and restoration to their master, so they left American soil for the safety of England, as did many other slaves who eventually told their story in narrative.

Other narratives confirm this tendency to run away from southern slave masters, but northern slaves also ran away, as the story of the Crafts shows, and many of them ran to Europe. During the Revolutionary War, England offered runaway slaves sanctuary, and some fought on the side of the British forces. By some accounts over 3,000 former slaves left America when the British were defeated, and many ran away from their masters specifically so they could make their way to England and the tougher slave laws there.

Many of the narratives, both North and South, show industrious slaves who worked side jobs to earn money, and often they used this money to escape. The Crafts had nearly $600 dollars between them to finance their escape, and many other slaves including Frederick Douglass, did the same thing (although Douglass had to give a majority of his earnings to his master). This indicates how industrious these men and women were, but it also shows how important freedom was to them. They would do anything, even work themselves nearly to death, to be free, and that is a lingering and poignant theme in almost all these narratives.

Many of the narratives also show families torn apart, as noted in both the North and South. This is perhaps the most brutal element of slavery, and certainly the most difficult to read about. The slaves were treated like animals, and owners had no regrets about selling one or more members of the family to another owner, splitting up families often for life. Many accounts tell of slaves never knowing what happened to their relatives, and never seeing them again, something that seems incomprehensible and incredibly cruel even today.

It is important to note that many of the female slave narratives include descriptions of sexual liaisons with white men, either forced or at will, often leading to the birth of mulatto children. Sometimes the white slave owners raised these children, and sometimes they remained with their slave mothers. One researcher notes, "Of course, sexual practices on the slave plantation and, specifically, sexual violence -- understood not only as a form of sexual deviance but central to the very definition of it -- established whiteness as the requisite racial category."