Part 30 (1/2)
Slaveowners, on the other hand, were equally reluctant to hire their slaves to such corporations or contractors except in times of special depression, for construction camps from their lack of sanitation, discipline, domesticity and stability were at the opposite pole from plantations as places of slave residence. High wages were no adequate compensation for the liability to contagious and other diseases, demoralization, and the checking of the birth rate by the separation of husbands and wives. The higher the valuation of slave property, the greater would be the strength of these considerations.
Slaves were a somewhat precarious property under all circ.u.mstances. Losses were incurred not only through disease[48] and flight but also through sudden death in manifold ways, and through theft. A few items will furnish ill.u.s.tration. An early Charleston newspaper printed the following: ”On the ninth instant Mr. Edward North at Pon Pon sent a sensible negro fellow to Moon's Ferry for a jug of rum, which is about two miles from his house; and he drank to that excess in the path that he died within six or seven hours.”[49] From the Eutaws in the same state a correspondent wrote in 1798 of a gin-house disaster: ”I yesterday went over to Mr. Henry Middleton's plantation to view the dreadful effects of a flash of lightning which the day before fell on his machine house in which were about twenty negro men, fourteen of which were killed immediately.”[50] In 1828 the following appeared in a newspaper at New Orleans: ”Yesterday towards one o'clock P.M., as one of the ferry boats was crossing the river with sixteen slaves on board belonging to General Wade Hampton, with their baggage, a few rods distant from the sh.o.r.e these negroes, being frightened by the motion of the boat, all threw themselves on the same side, which caused the boat to fill; and notwithstanding the prompt a.s.sistance afforded, four or five of these unfortunates perished.”[51] In 1839 William Lowndes Yancey, who was then a planter in South Carolina, lost his whole gang through the poisoning of a spring on his place, and was thereby bankrupted.[52] About 1858 certain bandits in western Louisiana abducted two slaves from the home of the Widow Bernard on Bayou Vermilion. After the lapse of several months they were discovered in the possession of one Apcher, who was tried for the theft but acquitted. The slaves when restored to their mistress were put in the kitchen, bound together by their hands. But while the family was at dinner the two ran from the house and drowned themselves in the bayou. The narrator of the episode attributed the impulse for suicide to the taste for vagabondage and the hatred for work which the negroes had acquired from the bandit.[53]
[Footnote 48: For the effect of epidemics _see_ above, pp. 300, 301.]
[Footnote 49: _South Carolina Gazette_, Feb. 12 to 19, 1741.]
[Footnote 50: _Carolina Gazette_ (Charleston), Feb. 4, 1798, supplement.]
[Footnote 51: _Louisiana Courier_, Mch. 3, 1828.]
[Footnote 52: J.W. DuBose, _Life of W.L. Yancey_ (Birmingham, Ala., 1892), p. 39.]
[Footnote 53: Alexandra Barbe, _Histoire des Comites de Vigilance aux Attakapas_] (Louisiana, 1861), pp. 182-185.
The governor of South Carolina reported the convictions of five white men for the crime of slave stealing in the one year;[54] and in the penitentiary lists of the several states the designation of slave stealers was fairly frequent, in spite of the fact that the death penalty was generally prescribed for the crime. One method of their operation was described in a Georgia newspaper item of 1828 which related that two wagoners upon meeting a slave upon the road persuaded him to lend a hand in s.h.i.+fting their load. When the negro entered the wagon they overpowered him and drove on. When they camped for the night they bound him to the wheel; but while they slept he cut his thongs and returned to his master.[55] The greatest activities in this line, however, were doubtless those of the Murrell gang of desperadoes operating throughout the southwest in the early thirties with a shrewd scheme for victimizing both whites and blacks. They would conspire with a slave, promising him his freedom or some other reward if he would run off with them and suffer himself to be sold to some unwary purchaser and then escape to join them again.[56] Sometimes they repeated this process over and over again with the same slave until a threat of exposure from him led to his being silenced by murder. In the same period a smaller gang with John Washburn as its leading spirit and with Natchez as informal headquarters, was busy at burglary, highway and flatboat robbery, pocket picking and slave stealing.[57] In 1846 a prisoner under arrest at Cheraw, South Carolina, professed to reveal a new conspiracy for slave stealing with ramifications from Virginia to Texas; but the details appear not to have been published.[58]
[Footnote 54: H.M. Henry, _The Police Control of the Slave in South Carolina_ [1914], pp. 110-112.]
[Footnote 55: _The Athenian_ (Athens, Ga.), Aug. 19, 1828.]
[Footnote 56: H.R. Howard, compiler, _The History of Virgil A. Stewart and his Adventure in capturing and exposing the great ”Western Land Pirate” and his Gang_ (New York, 1836), pp. 63-68, 104, _et pa.s.sim_. The truth of these accounts of slave stealings is vouched for in a letter to the editor of the New Orleans _Bulletin_, reprinted in the _Federal Union_ (Milledgeville, Ga.), Nov. 5, 1835.]
[Footnote 57: The manifold felonies of the gang were described by Washburn in a dying confession after his conviction for a murder at Cincinnati.
Natchez _Courier_, reprinted in the _Louisiana Courier_ (New Orleans), Feb.
28, 1837. Other reports of the theft of slaves appear in the Charleston _Morning Post and Daily Advertiser_, Nov. 2, 1786; _Southern Banner_ (Athens, Ga.), July 19, 1834, advertis.e.m.e.nt; _Federal Union_ (Milledgeville, Ga.), July 18, 1835; and the following New Orleans journals: _Louisiana Gazette_, Apr. 1 and Sept. 10, 1819; _Mercantile Advertiser_, Sept 29, 1831; _Bee_, Dec. 14, 1841; Mch. 10, 1845, and Aug.
1 and Nov. 11, 1848; _Louisiana Courier_, Mch. 29 and Sept. 18, 1840; _Picayune_, Aug. 21, 1845.]
[Footnote 58: New Orleans _Commercial Times_, Aug. 26, 1846.]
Certain hostile critics of slavery a.s.serted that in one district or another masters made reckonings favorable to such driving of slaves at their work as would bring premature death. Thus f.a.n.n.y Kemble wrote in 1838, when on the Georgia coast: ”In Louisiana ... the humane calculation was not only made but openly and unhesitatingly avowed that the planters found it upon the whole their most profitable plan to work off (kill with labour) their whole number of slaves about once in seven years, and renew the whole stock.”[59] The English traveler Featherstonhaugh likewise wrote of Louisiana in 1844, when he had come as close to it as East Tennessee, that ”the duration of life for a sugar mill hand does not exceed seven years.”[60] William Goodell supported a similar a.s.sertion of his own in 1853 by a series of citations. The first of these was to Theodore Weld as authority, that ”Professor Wright” had been told at New York by Dr. Deming of Ashland, Ohio, a story that Mr. d.i.c.kinson of Pittsburg had been told by Southern planters and slave dealers on an Ohio River steamboat. The tale thus vouched for contained the a.s.sertion that sugar planters found that by the excessive driving of slaves day and night in the grinding season they could so increase their output that ”they could afford to sacrifice one set of hands in seven years,” and ”that this horrible system was now practised to a considerable extent.” The second citation was likewise to Weld for a statement by Mr. Samuel Blackwell of Jersey City, whose testimonial lay in the fact of his members.h.i.+p in the Presbyterian church, that while on a tour in Louisiana ”the planters generally declared to him that they were obliged so to overwork their slaves during the sugar-making season (from eight to ten weeks) as to use them up in seven or eight years.” The third was to the Rev. Mr. Reed of London who after a tour in Maryland, Virginia and Kentucky in 1834 published the following: ”I was told, confidentially, from excellent authority, that recently at a meeting of planters in South Carolina the question was seriously discussed whether the slave is more profitable to the owner if well fed, well clothed and worked lightly, or if made the most of at once and exhausted in some eight years. The decision was in favor of the last alternative”[61] An anonymous writer in 1857 repeated this last item without indication of its date or authority but with a shortening of the period of exhaustion to ”some four or five years.”[62]
[Footnote 59: Frances A. Kemble, _Journal_ (New York, 1863), p. 28.]
[Footnote 60: G.W. Featherstonhaugh, _Excursion Through the Slave States_ (London, 1844), I, 120. Though Featherstonhaugh afterward visited New Orleans his book does not recur to this topic.]
[Footnote 61: William Goodell, _The American Slave Code in Theory and Practise_ (New York, 1853), pp. 79-81, citing Theodore Weld, _Slavery as it is_, p 39, and Mattheson, _Visit to the American Churches_, II, 173.]
[Footnote 62: _The Suppressed Book about Slavery! Prepared for publication in 1857, never published until the present time_ (New York, 1864), p. 211.]
These a.s.sertions, which have been accepted by some historians as valid, prompt a series of reflections. In the first place, anyone who has had experience with negro labor may reasonably be skeptical when told that healthy, well fed negroes, whether slave or free, can by any routine insistence of the employer be driven beyond the point at which fatigue begins to be injurious. In the second place, plantation work as a rule had the limitation of daylight hours; in plowing, mules which could not be hurried set the pace; in hoeing, haste would imperil the plants by enhancing the proportion of misdirected strokes; and in the harvest of tobacco, rice and cotton much perseverance but little strain was involved.
The sugar harvest alone called for heavy exertion and for night work in the mill. But common report in that regard emphasized the st.u.r.dy sleekness as well as the joviality of the negroes in the grinding season;[63] and even if exhaustion had been characteristic instead, the brevity of the period would have prevented any serious debilitating effect before the coming of the more leisurely schedule after harvest. In fact many neighboring Creole and Acadian farmers, fishermen and the like were customarily enlisted on wages as plantation recruits in the months of stress.[64] The sugar district furthermore was the one plantation area within easy reach of a considerable city whence a seasonal supply of extra hands might be had to save the regular forces from injury. The fact that a planter, as reported by Sir Charles Lyell, failed to get a hundred recruits one year in the midst of the grinding season[65] does not weaken this consideration. It may well have been that his neighbors had forestalled him in the wage-labor market, or that the remaining Germans and Irish in the city refused to take the places of their fellows who were on strike. It is well established that sugar planters had systematic recourse to immigrant labor for ditching and other severe work.[66] It is incredible that they ignored the same recourse if at any time the requirements of their crop threatened injury to their property in slaves. The recommendation of the old Roman, Varro, that freemen be employed in harvesting to save the slaves[67] would apply with no more effect, in case of need, to the pressing of oil and wine than to the grinding of sugar-cane. Two months' wages to a Creole, a ”'Cajun” or an Irishman would be cheap as the price of a slave's continued vigor, even when slave prices were low. On the whole, however, the stress of the grinding was not usually as great as has been fancied. Some of the regular hands in fact were occasionally spared from the harvest at its height and set to plow and plant for the next year's crop.[68]
[Footnote 63: E. g., Olmsted, _Seaboard Slave States_, p. 668.]
[Footnote 64: _DeBow's Review_, XI, 606.]
[Footnote 65: _See_ above, p. 337.]
[Footnote 66: See above, pp. 301, 302.]