A Renegade History of the United States Read online

  In the 1850s, Frederick Law Olmsted spent a year’s time touring the South and wrote three volumes describing what he saw. Nothing was more striking to Olmsted than the inefficiency of slaves, who appeared “to move very slowly and awkwardly.” The slaves he saw avoided work every chance they got, as he observed on one plantation near Charleston: “The overseer rode about among them, on a horse, carrying in his hand a rawhide whip, constantly directing and encouraging them; but, as my companion and I, both, several times noticed, as often as he visited one end of the line of operations, the hands at the other end would discontinue their labor, until he turned to ride towards them again.” Typical tasks for slaves, wrote Olmsted, “certainly would not be considered excessively hard by a Northern laborer; and, in point of fact, the more industrious and active hands finish them often by two o’clock.”

  Slave owners publicly denied the charges made by their anti-slavery opponents that their laborers were unproductive, but privately they admitted it. One planter in North Carolina wrote with great insight on how the nature of slavery limited its productivity. The slaves, he said, “are not stimulated to care and industry as white people are, who labor for themselves. They do not feel themselves interested in what they do, for arbitrary masters and mistresses, and their education is not such as can be expected to inspire them with sentiments of honor and gratitude.” A planter in eighteenth-century Virginia frequently complained in his diary about the “poor work” of his slaves. They were “quite indifferent both as to the time they go about it, and indeed the care they ought to use,” he wrote. “I find it almost impossible to make a Negro do his work well. No orders can engage it, no encouragement persuade it, nor no Punishment oblige it.” Most slave owners refused to acknowledge that they had less power than the employer of free labor, and they chalked up their slaves’ shiftlessness to what they believed to be the natural inferiority of blacks.

  The slaves were indeed shiftless, but given the quality of their lives compared to the lives of free laborers, we might ask whether they were in fact the superior group.

  There is now wide agreement among historians of the Old South that slaves did not share the American devotion to work. And here was the key to understanding Dan Emmett’s envy. The beautiful irony of slavery was that it guaranteed food, shelter, clothing, health care, and child care for the enslaved—and even allowed for the acquisition of luxuries and money—without requiring the self-denial of “free” labor.

  On every plantation he visited, Olmsted found at least one slave not working “on account of some illness, strain, bruise or wound, of which he or she was complaining.” According to Olmsted, “[t]he slave, if he is indisposed to work, and especially if he is not treated well, or does not like the master who has hired him, will sham sickness—even make himself sick or lame—that he need not work.” We have substantial quantitative evidence of this from three Mississippi plantations in the early nineteenth century. On the Wheeles plantation, one out of seven working days was lost to slaves claiming they were too sick to work. On the Bowles plantation, of the 159 days missed due to illness in one year, only five were Sundays, when there was the least work to do. The Leigh plantation, where only thirty slaves worked, reported 398 sick days in one year. At these plantations, the rates of sickness peaked on Saturdays and during the planting and harvest seasons, when there was the most work to be done. This kind of resistance to work was simply unavailable to free whites dependent on their own labor for survival. If they were like most Americans, such resistance would have carried the heavy price of shame. Slaves rarely, if ever, paid that price.

  The concept of a “vacation,” and certainly the belief that one was entitled to leave the duties of work and home for extended periods, did not exist among free Americans until well after the Civil War. Slaves, on the other hand, while not employing the concept of a vacation, pioneered the practice. “Sometimes,” an ex-slave named Lorenzo L. Ivy remembered, “slaves jes’ run’ ’way to de woods fo’ a week or two to git a res’ fum de fiel’, an’ den dey come on back.” Sallie Smith took frequent breaks from work, and unlike most free laborers, she felt no shame in it. “Sometimes I’d go so far off from the plantation I could not hear the cows low or the roosters crow,” she said. Vacating the workplace in this way was called “truancy” by slave owners, and it was rampant. Virtually all the plantations whose records are available show that disappearances lasting days, weeks, months, and even years were common. Olmsted noted that masters were limited in their ability to increase workloads by the “danger of a general stampede to the ‘swamp’—a danger the slave can always hold before his master’s cupidity.” Further suggesting the power of slaves over their masters, historians have found as many reports of masters declining to punish truants upon their return as of those who levied a penalty. Often a slave would stay in the woods, on a neighboring plantation, or in a nearby town until receiving a promise of amnesty. Remaining away from the plantation for an extended period was often made possible by the assistance of other slaves, who provided runaways with food and other provisions, news from home, and warnings of patrols. As a judge in South Carolina lamented, “[t]he strictest watching could not at times prevent them from visiting their acquaintances.” Some truants simply moved their residency to the quarters of a neighboring plantation. The number of slaves who regularly ran away was so great that Dr. Samuel Cartwright, one of the South’s leading medical authorities, concluded that blacks were uniquely susceptible to a disease he called “drapeto-mania,” whose main symptom was “the absconding from service.”

  Even the slaves themselves agreed that they were averse to work. A stunning number of slaves agreed with their masters that they were biologically disinclined to work. “De black man is natchally lazy, you knows dat,” said James Johnson, voicing a commonly expressed sentiment in interviews with ex-slaves. “De reason he talks lak he does, is ’cause he don’t want to go to de trouble to ’nounce his words lak they ought to be.” Many believed that only physical coercion could make a slave work. “When he come here, de white man made him work, and he didn’t like that,” said Jane Johnson, “[h]e is natchally lazy … Ever since the first time de nigger found out he had to work, he has silently despised the white man.”

  The belief that this reluctance to work was “natural” was discounted by the eminent black social scientist W. E. B. DuBois, who explained it as the inevitable consequence of forced labor: “All observers spoke of the fact that the slaves were slow and churlish; that they wasted material and malingered at their work. Of course they did. This was not racial but economic. It was the answer of any group of laborers forced down to the last ditch.

  They might be made to work continuously but no power could make them work well.” DuBois went even further, arguing that this was the slaves’ inherent advantage over whites who worked for themselves. The slave “was not as easily reduced to be the mechanical draft-horse which the northern European laborer became. He was not easily brought to recognize any ethical sanctions in work as such but tended to work as the results pleased him and refused to work or sought to refuse when he did not find the spiritual returns adequate; thus he was easily accused of laziness and driven as a slave when in truth he brought to modern manual labor a renewed valuation of life.” Yes, DuBois seemed to say to his white readers, slaves did not believe that work is better than life, and why do you?

  Truancy and malingering were also effective means of getting rid of one’s boss. Many shiftless slaves were sold by masters who could no longer afford their inefficiency. Indeed, in an era when the vast majority of free Americans lived on family farms, were born to their employers—their fathers—and were morally prohibited from leaving their jobs, it is entirely reasonable to argue that slaves possessed more occupational mobility than the average free American.

  For all these reasons, slaves not only worked with less intensity than free Americans, they also worked much less often. Economic historians have determined that on average, Northern farm
ers worked four hundred more hours per year than did slaves. And no group in world history worked more than industrial workers in the nineteenth-century United States. For the unlucky souls who found themselves in the first American factories, the typical workday was fourteen hours, the typical workweek was six days, and putting in more than one hundred hours in a week was not at all uncommon.*

  LIMITS OF THE LASH

  Even the reader who concedes that slaves labored less than free workers and enjoyed many liberties that American citizens denied themselves might at this point raise the objection that, in the final analysis, the physical punishment suffered by slaves unquestionably made their lives worse. The life of Horace Lane provides one easy answer to this. Born in 1788, Lane was whipped repeatedly before he reached seven years old. At seven he was forced to work in the fields, and he was frequently beaten by his overseer. As an adult, he suffered “many severe floggings” for neglecting his work and for stealing. Very few slaves suffered as much physical punishment as this, and Horace Lane was a free white man from New York State. Lane’s memoir, The Wandering Boy, is one of many accounts of severe and frequent physical punishment experienced by free people during the age of slavery.

  Corporal punishment was promoted and frequently practiced in free American homes and schools until the middle of the nineteenth century. Parents and teachers used the birch, rod, and whip, as well as the open hand, to keep children in line. Because Dan Emmett was fond of dancing and other amusements, he almost certainly suffered physical applications of one of the sternest lessons in Webster’s American Spelling Book: “As for those boys and girls that mind not their books, they will come to some bad end, and must be whipt till they mend their ways.” Early American schools “resounded with strokes of the rod,” as one historian has put it. Schoolmasters beat their pupils not only with wooden rods but also with cat-o’-nine-tails and leather whips. Children caught talking in class were gagged and then had their necks clamped together between wooden blocks called “whispering sticks.” Because Quakers were barred by their religion from using violence, their schools in Pennsylvania instead disciplined students by locking their necks and hands in pillories, shackling their legs, or hanging them in sacks. Six out of nine child-rearing books published in the United States in the early nineteenth century advocated the use of corporal punishment, and government authorities rarely took action against it. Typical was one Massachusetts judge’s ruling that corporal punishment was an “imperative duty” of schools and necessary “to maintain good government … and secure proper subordination in all.”

  Several of America’s greatest heroes who were born during the age of slavery were whipped far more often than most slaves. Davy Crockett’s father continually beat him with a hickory stick. Robert E. Lee was raised by an aunt who believed that the best way to instruct children was to “whip and pray and pray and whip.” John D. Rockefeller was frequently tied to a tree and whipped by his mother. Abraham Lincoln’s father beat him with fists and a horsewhip. Most significantly, none of these men believed that their treatment was abnormal. The historian Elizabeth Pleck has found fifty-eight diaries and autobiographies of free white people who were born before 1850 that recount instances of physical punishment. These were the children of merchants, plantation owners, ministers, farmers, lawyers, craftsmen, and schoolteachers, in the North and South. All of the children in this group, born between 1750 and 1799, were hit with an object, usually a whip, and among those born between 1800 and 1850, 80 percent were struck with an instrument at least once. It was also common and considered appropriate as a means of training for craftsmen to beat the children and young adults who served them as apprentices.

  Among free whites, severe physical punishment, including death, at the hands of authorities was a common occurrence. During the colonial period, not only murder and rape but also arson, adultery, buggery, and witchcraft were punishable by death. In eighteenth-century Virginia, a first conviction for hog stealing brought twenty-five lashes; the second offense was punished by two hours in the pillory, nailed by the ears. The third offense sent one to the gallows. In Massachusetts, first-time burglars were branded on the forehead with the letter B; second offenders were branded and whipped; a third offense made one “incorrigible” and, therefore, subject to death. All of the colonies ordered whipping, branding, and other forms of bodily mutilation for crimes such as breaking the Sabbath, petty larceny, and sedition. Laws in several colonies called for children over the age of sixteen who struck or cursed their parents to be punished with death, whipping, or imprisonment. Debtors and drunkards, and those simply suspected of criminal activity or moral degeneracy, were placed in stocks and public cages, where they were spit on, pelted with rocks, punched, and kicked by passersby. In the military, flogging was the standard punishment for drunkenness, swearing, and insubordination until the late nineteenth century.

  After the founding of the United States, a new, modern form of punishment became increasingly popular. It was more brutal, more dehumanizing, and more comprehensive than anything experienced by slaves, and it was designed exclusively for free people. In the first American prisons, inmates were confined in crowded, dark, unventilated, filthy, windowless rooms. Some prisons were built in old mine shafts, so that the convicts would live and die entirely underground. Disease, rape, beatings, murder, and riots were so common that reformers in the nineteenth century developed a new kind of correctional system that reflected the American ideal of self-discipline and was in many ways more severe than the original dungeons.

  There were two types of prison in nineteenth-century America. Luckier convicts were sent to prisons based on Auburn State Prison in New York. There they slept alone, one to a cell. Communication among prisoners—even the exchange of glances—was prohibited. While visiting the Auburn prison in 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville was struck by its absence of life. “Everything passes in the most profound silence, and nothing is heard in the whole prison but the steps of those who march, or sounds proceeding from the workshops.” When the inmates were in their cells, “the silence within these vast walls” was “that of death.” Tocqueville and his traveling partner “felt as if we had traversed catacombs; there were a thousand living beings, and yet it was a desert solitude.” In this total silence and isolation, the inmates performed repetitive manual labor eight to ten hours a day, six days a week. Less fortunate convicts were sent to prisons based on the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, where the isolation was so complete that newcomers wore hoods over their heads on the way to their cells so they would neither see nor be seen by anyone. In a “Pennsylvania plan” prison, inmates worked alone in their cells and were allowed nothing to read but the Bible. As in the Auburn prisons, communication among prisoners was forbidden. The purpose of both prison systems was to force, through external coercion, the discipline of American life onto free citizens who had not internalized it. It was not intended or used for slaves. As Sylvia Canon, an ex-slave from South Carolina, remembered many years after black people became eligible for incarceration, “Times was sho better long time ago den dey be now … Never hear tell bout no colored people been put in jail ’fore freedom.”

  As for the physical punishment of slaves, the records of the Bennet Barrow plantation in Louisiana provide the most reliable source of quantitative evidence. During a two-year period in the early 1840s, there were, according to which historian you believe, either 0.7 or 1.03 whippings per slave per year. Whichever number is more accurate—and to the twenty-first-century mind a single whipping in a lifetime is an unspeakable horror—it is quite likely that free whites, especially children, received physical punishments more frequently than this. Historians now widely agree that slave masters were forced to limit the amount of punishment given to slaves, since they were likely, after a certain point, to receive diminishing returns from the pain they administered. Said one owner about the inherent limitations of the lash, “[i]n working niggers, we always calculate that they will not labor at all exce
pt to avoid punishment, and they will never do more than just enough to save themselves from being punished, and no amount of punishment will prevent their working carelessly or indifferently.” Overuse of punishment worked against the master because it pushed the slave away from obligation to work and toward rebellion: “It always seems on the plantations as if they took pains to break all the tools and spoil all the cattle that they possibly can, even when they know they’ll be directly punished for it.” A northern journalist assigned to cover southern agriculture in the 1840s observed that “all the whips in Christendom cannot drive them to perform more than they think they ought to do, or have been in the habit of doing.” George Washington, who knew quite a bit about the problems of managing slaves, understood this well: “When an overlooker’s back is turned, the most of them will slight their work, or be idle altogether, in which case correction cannot retrieve either but often produces evils which are worse than the disease,” he wrote in a farming instruction manual.

  One consequence of whipping was the loss of untold numbers of man-hours. Thousands of notices advertising for the capture of fugitive slaves were distributed every year, and they frequently stated that the escapee had been recently punished. One slaveholder advised a friend that slaves would not accept being “dealt harshly with—otherwise they will run off—and if once the habit of absconding is fixed, it is difficult to conquer it.” Other slaves made their masters pay for abuse in other ways, as did Andy Anderson of Texas after his first whipping: “After dat whippin’ I doesn’t have de heart to work for de massa. If I seed de cattle in de cornfield, I turns de back, ’stead of chasin’ ’em out.”

  Those who whipped slaves often paid even more dearly. One day in 1846, James Ward, an overseer on a plantation in Mississippi, delivered one blow too many to a slave named David, who killed him instantly with an axe to the back of the head. A similar fate befell Matthew Lassley, another particularly brutal overseer in Mississippi, who had an axe blade driven three inches into his skull by a slave named Bill. Sometimes retaliation was carried out in secret. The ex-slave Anthony Abercrombie remembered that one of his overseers was killed on the bank of a creek one night. “Dey never did find out who killed him, but Marse Jim always b’lieved de field han’s done it.” Even slave women retaliated against overseers. Silvia DuBois struck one with “a hell of a blow with my fist.” Often in these cases, the humiliation was so great that the owner refused to intervene. As one master told an overseer who had been beaten by a slave woman, “[W]ell, if that is the best you could do with her, damned if you won’t just have to take it.” We do not have precise numbers for such incidents, but we do know that every district in the South reported at least one violent act of resistance by a slave to a whipping. Even more remarkably, in many cases, the resistant slave was allowed to live, and sometimes no punishment was meted out at all. What the slaves had to their advantage that free whites did not was their status as the most valuable property in their society. Masters were therefore often reluctant to kill slaves, even those who struck back against whites.