A Renegade History of the United States Read online

  “Thousands of illustrious families,” a newspaper lamented in 1834, “are compelled to take the situation of tenants, or are scattered into factories, and into the kitchens of the rich—or, more happily for them, driven in exile to the remoter West.” Beginning in the 1830s, teenage girls and young women from all over New England left their families and took jobs in the textile mills that were America’s first factories. Untold numbers of men—many of them fathers—left their homesteads to find a better life in the West. The vast majority did not take their families with them.

  Perhaps the greatest advantage that slaves had over free Americans was their exemption from the ultimate obligation of citizenship. In addition to the more than six hundred thousand free Americans who died fighting in the country’s wars before 1865, a roughly equal number were wounded. Among the wounded were those who were blinded or crippled, lost limbs, or were otherwise maimed. Except for the very few slaves who were forced to fight, and the even smaller number who volunteered, this suffering was reserved entirely for the free.

  GOING DOWN

  A common, seemingly fantastical theme in early minstrelsy was the flamboyant dress of the slave characters. Dan Emmett’s boatman wore a “[s]ky blue jacket and tarpaulin hat,” and “Dandy Jim” sported pantaloons. Sheet music for many songs, such as the famous “Zip Coon,” showed black “dandies” in top hats and tuxedos and “dandizettes” in elaborate gowns. The dandy, dressed in tails, top hat, ruffles, watch chain, and white gloves, was a stock figure in minstrel shows. But this was based more on observation than imagination. In their study of thousands of advertisements of runaway slaves—which often included detailed descriptions of the fugitives’ appearances—as well as accounts of white observers and slaves themselves, Shane White and Graham White, authors of the most comprehensive history of African American expressive culture, found evidence of “an almost bewildering variety in slave apparel.” They also found that slaves quite often dressed better than free whites. The fugitive notices comprise a virtual catalog of the finest clothing available in early America. According to the masters who wrote the notices—and who had every reason to be accurate in their descriptions—the runaways’ wardrobes included imported waistcoats and petticoats, velvet capes, fur hats, silk bonnets and hats trimmed with gauze and feathers, ball gowns, high-heeled shoes, linen shirts, ruffles, silver cufflinks and buckles, gold lace, stockings, and various items made of “superfine Cloth.”

  How was all this finery obtained? According to White and White, there is ample evidence that many blacks stole clothes but also many admissions by slave owners that they gave away their clothes to their bondmen. A great many slaves also purchased clothes with their own money, which they earned from jobs they took outside their masters’ domain. Historians widely agree that this kind of hiring out was common in the slave South, and that slaves were usually allowed to keep some or all of the wages they earned. Best of all, unlike legally free workers, when their jobs ended, they were ensured of having room, board, medical care, and child care provided for them. They were also, unlike “good” citizens, not ashamed to enjoy the fruits of their labor.

  The men who created the ideal American citizen dressed him in homely clothing. “He appear’d in the plainest Country Garb,” said Benjamin Franklin. “His Great Coat was coarse and looked old and thread-bare; his Linnen was homespun; his Beard perhaps of Seven Days Growth, his Shoes thick and heavy, and every Part of his Dress corresponding.” As we have seen, leaders of the new nation were universally adamant that Americans must acquire wealth but not please themselves with it. The revolutionary scribe Joel Barlow warned in 1787 that “[w]henever democratic states degenerate from those noble republican virtues which constitute the chief excellency, spring, and even basis of their government, and instead of industry, frugality, and economy, encourage luxury, dissipation and extravagence, we may justly conclude that ruin is near at hand … No virtue, no Commonwealth.” Hezekiah Niles, a journalist and leading spokesman for American independence, understood well the connections between pleasure and slavery, between discipline and what he called freedom: “[B]efore a nation is completely deprived of freedom, she must be fitted for slavery by her vices.”

  The attacks on ostentation continued in the early national period. In 1843 Cornelius Mathews, the poet of “Young America,” described the “Man in the Republic” as living “With plainness in thy daily pathway walk / And disencumbered of excess.” Women were instructed to wear dresses of “surpassing neatness and simplicity,” and respectable urban men were expected to become what a business directory in the 1850s called “the unknown knight, with his plain unostentatious black armor.” In 1853 William Marcy, the secretary of state in Franklin Pierce’s new administration, ordered diplomats to wear “the simple dress of an American citizen,” which would best demonstrate their “devotion to republican institutions.”

  Slaves were happily free of such obligations to the nation. In 1744, less than a decade after South Carolina issued restrictions on clothing that black people could wear, a grand jury expressed concern that slaves didn’t seem to care: “[I]t is apparent, that Negro Women in particular do not restrain themselves in the Cloathing as the Law requires, but dress in Apparel quite gay and beyond their Condition.” Twenty-five years later, the slaves still didn’t care. A letter to the South Carolina Gazette complained that “many of the Female Slaves [are] by far more elegantly dressed, than the Generality of White Women below Affluence.” A Canadian visitor to Charleston in 1845 was amazed at the attire of slaves: “[S]uch exquisite dandies, such gorgeously dressed women, I never saw before—howling swells, all of them! All slaves!” Similarly, Frederick Law Olmsted noted that many blacks in Richmond, Virginia, on a Sunday were “dressed with foppish extravagence, and many in the latest style of fashion.” In wealthier neighborhoods, “there were many more well-dressed and highly-dressed coloured people than white; and among this dark gentry the finest French cloths, embroidered waistcoats, patent-leather shoes, resplendent brooches, silk hats, kid gloves, and eau de mille-fleurs, were quite common.” Olmsted also remarked that slaves took “a real pleasure, for instance, such as it is a rare thing for a white man to be able to feel, in bright and strongly contrasting colours, and in music, in which nearly all are proficient to some extent.” During the Civil War, a northerner in Houston saw “innumerable Negroes and Negresses parading about the streets in the most outrageously grand costumes,” clothes that greatly surpassed the “simple dresses” of their mistresses.

  The greatest object of white envy was the musical felicity of slaves, and on this score many black people actually expressed pity for their imitators. One of them, Solomon Northup, saw how white people danced when he played the violin at his master’s balls. He couldn’t help but feel sorry for them: “Oh, ye pleasure-seeking sons and daughters of idleness, who move with measured step, listless and snail-like, through the slow winding cotillon, if ye wish to look upon the celerity, if not the ‘poetry of motion’—upon genuine happiness, rampant and unrestrained—go down to Louisiana and see the slaves dancing in the starlight of a Christmas night.” In fact, many whites did “go down” to see the slaves dancing. They came from the North. They came from Europe. And they came down from the big house. What they all saw was a joy that was alien to them. Laura Towne traveled from her home in Philadelphia to South Carolina to educate and “civilize” freed slaves during the Civil War. She was appalled by slave culture, but especially by the fun she witnessed:

  Tonight I have been to a “shout” which seems to me certainly the remains of some old idol worship. The Negroes sing a kind of chorus—three standing apart to lead and clap—and then all the others go shuffling round in a circle following one another with not much regularity, turning round occasionally and bending the knees, and stamping so that the whole floor swings. I never saw anything so savage. They call it a religious ceremony, but it seems more like a regular frolic to me.

  The British painter Eyre Crowe, who toured t
he South with the author William Thackeray, wrote of his amazement at a slave ball in Charleston:

  We had the privilege of being invited to one of these amusements … The minstrels were embowered in greenery as they played waltzes and quadrilles, which were danced with great zest, and the hall rang with good-humored laughter … The striking features of Negro evening dress consisted in astonishing turbans with marabou feathers, into which add accessories of squib shape and other forms were inserted.

  The South Carolina Gazette could barely contain its envy in its description of a “Country Dance, Rout or Cabal of Negroes”:

  It consisted of about 60 people, 5–6th from Town, every one of whom carried something, in the manner just described; as bottled liquors of all sorts. Rum, Tongues, Hams, Beef, Geese, Turkes and Fowls both drest and raw, with many luxuries of the table as sweetmeats, pickles & …

  Then they danced, betted, gamed, swore, quarreled, fought, and did everything that the most modern accomplished gentlemen are not ashamed of.

  Many white observers commented that slaves danced with bent knees and elbows, which according to the historian Peter Wood, was probably an expression of the West African belief that “straightened knees, hips, and elbows”—which characterized European styles of dance—epitomized death and rigidity, “while flexed joints embodied energy and life.” Slaves were aware of this difference as well. At one plantation, “[t]hey did a takeoff on the high manners of the white folks in the ‘big house,’ but their masters, who gathered around to watch the fun, missed the point.”

  Such derision did not stop planters from building platforms from where they viewed the dances. Many paintings of plantation scenes show whites on these platforms or, closer to the action, on the ground watching slaves enjoying themselves. Elen Campbell, a former slave from Georgia, recalled in a WPA interview that white men who attended such festivities were attracted to more than just the music and dancing: “Den sometimes on Saddy night we have a big frolic. De nigger frum Hammond’s place and Phinizy place, Eve place, Clayton place, D’Laigle place all git togedder fer big dance and frolic. A lot o de young white sports used to come derre and push de nigger bucks aside and dance wid de wenches.” Frank Adamson of South Carolina, like many slaves who complained of the presence of whites at their dances, recalled that the sons of his master would “mix in wid de ’fairs of slave ’musements.”

  Slaves on most plantations held dances every Saturday night, but they also enjoyed themselves at impromptu weeknight gatherings and even on the day when fun was sacrilege. In colonial Maryland, whites complained to judicial authorities that slaves were “drunke on the Lords Day beating their Negro drums by which they call considerable Number of Negroes together in some Certaine places.” A visitor to New Orleans reported in 1799 that on a Sunday he saw “vast numbers of Negro slaves, men, women, and children, assembled together on the levee, dancing in large rings.” In 1804, another white voyeur in the city saw dancing Negroes “in great masses on the levee on Sundays.” In early-nineteenth-century St. Louis, Sunday frolics of slaves and free blacks were so large and boisterous that the military was brought out to suppress them. The unauthorized recreational activities of slaves in the Edgefield and Barnwell districts of South Carolina were so rampant that slaveholders formed the Savannah River Anti-Slave Traffick Association in the mid-1840s to stop the drinking and sneaking “abroad to night meetings” by the people they owned. “Hundreds of Negroes it may be said without exaggeration are every night, and at all hours of the night, prowling about the country.” Worse still, the slaves were doing this at the expense of their work: “The Negroes themselves are seriously impaired in physical qualities,” and “their nightly expeditions are followed by days of languor.”

  The white people who loved the “frolics” are often accused of romanticizing slave culture, but minstrels’ imaginings of slave parties are quite similar to descriptions made by the participants themselves. Betty Jones, who had been a slave on the Alvis plantation in Hendersonville, Kentucky, remembered the parties around the quarters:

  Every gal with her beau and such music! Had two fiddles, two tambourines, two banjos, and two sets of bones. Was a boy named Joe who used to whistle, too. Them devilish boys would get out in the middle of the flo’ and me, jenny and the devil right with ’em.

  Fanny Berry of Virginia offered a similar description of the dancing of couples: “Dey come up an’ bend over toward each other at de waist, an’ de woman put her hands on her hips an’ de man roll his eyes all roun’ an’ grin an’ dey pat de flo’ wid dey feet just like dey was puttin’ it in place.” One ex-slave no doubt shocked his white interviewers in the 1930s when he recalled the celebrations on his plantation after the master and mistress gave out presents to the slaves. “After all dis, everybody was happy, singin’ and laughin’ all over de place. Go ’way from here, white man! Don’t tell me dat wasn’t de next step to heaven to de slaves on our plantation. I sees and dreams ’bout them good old times, back yonder, to dis day.”

  Though Dan Emmett never lived those times, he dreamt about them all his life. After the Civil War, he moved from New York to Chicago, where he continued to sing and play fiddle in minstrel shows. By the 1880s, minstrelsy had shed some of its lowbrow reputation and attained a degree of mainstream respectability. Emmett became a folk hero in the North, with performances in his honor at the Academy of Music and Grand Opera House in Chicago, and, more problematically, in the South. During the war, “Dixie” had been sung by both Union and Confederate soldiers, who were apparently untroubled by Emmett’s intention to make the song’s narrator a black slave. When the Confederacy became a memory and a symbol of whiteness, the song was captured and remade by the leaders of the Lost Cause. Just before Emmett died in 1904, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the United Confederate Veterans, and the United Sons of Confederate Veterans declared “Dixie” to be the “official song of the Confederacy” but replaced the original lyrics with “more appropriate words” that made the narrator a white soldier. When told that his song had been adopted by the white South, Emmett replied, “if I had known to what use they were going to put my song, I will be damned if I’d have written it.”

  “Dixie” and hundreds of songs like it gave voice not to a hatred of black people but to a love of blackness. And, as paradoxical as it seems, if we free our minds from modern morality, we can see that such a life-loving and infectious culture could only have been created by slaves. Free from the bondage of citizenship, is it any wonder that the slaves were able to enjoy themselves? Liberated from the responsibility of sustaining themselves and their offspring, should we be surprised that they sang and danced with a joy that was unknown to whites? Living outside the confines of American norms, was it a miracle that their descendants created America’s most important contribution to world culture—a music that operated outside and against Western musical structures with its celebration of improvisation and its rhythms that moved the body? Never fully a part of America, slaves were America’s original renegades.

  3

  THE SLAVERY OF FREEDOM

  Every day, seven days a week, John Freeman woke before dawn, washed himself, then immediately headed off to work. He worked as hard as he was physically able—regardless of the kind of labor he was doing or how much he was paid for it—all day long. The only breaks he took were those necessary to keep his body functioning and for church on Sundays. After twelve or fourteen or even sixteen hours of labor, John Freeman put his head down and returned immediately to his home. He did not drink alcohol or smoke tobacco. He did not dance. He wore plain and simple clothes and ate plain and simple food. He spent not a single cent on anything for his own enjoyment and did not go anyplace for fun. He had sex only with his wife and only to make children, never for pleasure. Clarissa Freeman, John’s wife, rose from bed with her husband before dawn. She then cooked and cleaned and straightened until she went to bed at night, shortly after supper. She never left the house. She never did anything for her
personal pleasure. She covered her body from chin to toe in plain, drab, and formless clothing. She lived entirely for her husband and eight children. And she most certainly never had sex for fun.

  Our textbooks tell us that Reconstruction, an attempt by the federal government and its allies during and after the Civil War to make the former slaves into American citizens, was a tragedy because it was abandoned. In the leading college textbook of the 1990s and 2000s, Reconstruction was “a small but important first step in the effort by former slaves to secure civil rights and economic power.”* But “when it came to an end, finally in the late 1870s … the freed slaves found themselves abandoned by the federal government to face a system of economic peonage and legal subordination alone.” The current definitive scholarly history of Reconstruction, Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution 1863–1877, proclaims that “for blacks its failure was a disaster whose magnitude cannot be obscured by the accomplishments that endured. For the nation as a whole, the collapse of Reconstruction was a tragedy that deeply affected the course of its development.” What these historians either willfully ignore or cannot see is that the promise of Reconstruction was to make all Americans—ex-slaves and whites—unfree. That is, unless you think the Freemans were free.